Sleater-Kinney

Sleater-Kinney has announced their eleventh studio album, Little Rope, which will be released January 19, 2024 via Loma Vista Recordings with a hauntingly intimate music video for lead single "Hell", directed by Ashley Connor and starring Miranda July. Recorded at Flora Recording and Playback in Portland, Oregon with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton,

Little Rope is a powerfully honest and soul-baring album by one of modern rock's most vital bands. Pre-order Little Rope HERE.

Little Rope is one of the finest, most delicately layered records in Sleater-Kinney's nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent - it careens headfirst into flaw and brokenness - a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us, and what we do to the world in return. On the surface, the album's 10 songs veer from spare to anthemic, catchy to deliberately hard-turning. But beneath that are perhaps the most complex and subtle arrangements of any Sleater-Kinney record, and a lyrical and emotional compass pointed firmly in the direction of something both liberating and terrifying: the sense that the only way to gain control is to let it go.

In the autumn of 2022, Carrie Brownstein received a call from Corin Tucker, who herself had just received a call from the American embassy in Italy. Years earlier, Brownstein listed Tucker as her emergency contact on a passport form, and while she had since changed her phone number, Tucker had not. The embassy staff were desperately trying to reach Brownstein. When they finally did, they told her what happened: While vacationing in Italy, Brownstein's mother and stepfather had been in a car accident. Both were killed.

Although some of the album had already been written, aspects of each song-a guitar solo, the singing style, the sonic approach-were pulled into a changed emotional landscape. As Brownstein and Tucker moved through the early aftermath of the tragedy, elements of what was to become the emotional backbone of Little Rope began to form - how we navigate grief, who we navigate it with, and the ways it transforms us. The result is a collision of certainty and uncertainty evident from the first few spare seconds of the record's opening track and first single, "Hell." Over an agoraphobic expanse of tone and a trickle of chords, Little Rope's emotional thesis statement begins to take form:

Hell don't have no worries Hell don't have no past
Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path

It's a restrained, controlled prologue, but control is fleeting. A few seconds later, well, all hell breaks loose.

LISTEN TO "HELL" HERE
WATCH OFFICIAL VIDEO FOR "HELL" HERE

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Black Belt Eagle Scout

he Land,The Water, The Sky

This land runs through Katherine Paul's blood. And it called to her. In dreams she saw the river, her ancestors, and her home. When the land calls, you listen. And KP found herself far from her ancestral lands during a time of collective trauma, when the world was wounded and in need of healing. In 2020 she made the journey from Portland back to the Skagit River, back to the cedar trees that stand tall and shrouded in fog, back to the tide flats and the mountains, back to Swinomish.

It is a powerful thing to return to our ancestral lands and often times the journey is not easy. Like the salmon through the currents, like the tide as it crawls to shore this is a story of return. It is the call and response. It is the outstretched arms of the people who came before, welcoming her home. The Land, The Water, The Sky is a celebration of lineage and strength. Even in its deepest moments of loneliness and grief, of frustration over a world wrought with colonial violence and pain, the songs remind us that if we slow down, if we listen to the waves and the wind through the trees, we will remember to breathe.

There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. There is a reimagining of Sedna who was offered to the sea, and a beautiful rumination on sacrifice and humanity, and what it means to hold the stories that work to teach us something.

Chord progressions born out of moments of sadness and solitude transform into the islands that sit blue along the horizon. The Salish Sea curves along her homelands, and when the singer is close to this water she is reminded of her grandmother, how she looked out at these same islands, and she's held by spirit and memory.

The Land, The Water, The Sky rises and falls, in darkness and in light, but even in its most melancholy moments it is never despairing. That is the beauty of returning home. When you stand on ancestral lands it is impossible to be alone. You feel the arms and hands that hold you up, unwilling to let you fall into sorrow or abandonment. In her songs Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. In every note she has written a love letter to indigenous strength and healing.

There is a joy present here, a fierce blissfulness that comes with walking the trails along the river, feeling the sand and the stones beneath her feet. It is the pride and the certainty that comes with knowing her ancestors walked along the same land, dipped their hands into the water, and ran their fingertips along the same bark of cedar trees.

This is a story of hope, as it details the joy of returning. Katherine Paul's journey home wasn't made alone, and the songs are crowded with loved ones and relatives, like a really good party. And as the songs walk us through the land it is important we hover over the images and the beauty, the moments that mark this album as site specific. The power of this land is woven throughout, telling the story of narrow waterways, brush strokes, salmon stinta, and above all healing.

Let it take you. Move through the story and see the land through her eyes, because it is a gift, a welcomed s?abad?b.