PORTLAND, Ore. -- It's just a basement. Half a basement, actually, in Carrie Brownstein's house in a quiet, tree-shaded neighborhood here in the city that is fast becoming known as Portlandia, after the cable-TV series she writes and stars in.
The narrow space has industrial gray carpeting and exposed pipes. There's room for a drum kit, a couple of amps, a table holding a mixer and keyboard, a couch. A few guitars sit on an overhead rack. Names of songs are written in erasable marker on a beige wall panel. It's more work space than hangout, and not particularly cozy -- just another rehearsal room.
But this happens to be the one that secretly incubated the reunion of a band that had been sorely missed in indie-rock since 2006: Sleater-Kinney.
"In here," Brownstein says, "it always seemed dark and insular, like we were assembling explosive devices and then wondering how and where they'll detonate, and how big the explosion will be."
With the seven albums it released from 1995 to 2005, Sleater-Kinney -- Brownstein and Corin Tucker on guitars and, since 1996, Janet Weiss on drums -- defined indie-rock principle, musical innovation and ferocious passion. They were grounded in a bold, undogmatic feminism; they wielded the power of rock to lash out at abuses of power and to look inward at desire, confusion, desperation and defiance. On Jan. 20, the band releases its first album since 2005: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop): 10 hurtling, bristling, densely packed, white-knuckled songs that are all taut construction and raw nerve. Unlike some reunion albums, it's not a safe reprise of past successes; it pushes past them, more melodic and more turbulent at the same time. It's the first great album of 2015.
The album emerged from almost a year of nearly clandestine songwriting followed by brief, productive stints of recording from January to March 2014. For the first time in its career, the band didn't perform any of its new songs live before recording them. Sleater-Kinney didn't even announce its reunion until long after the album was complete.
"For the life of me, I don't know how they kept it so quiet," says John Goodmanson, who produced the new album along with much of Sleater-Kinney's catalog.
"It was good that we wrote it in secret and that we didn't have to worry about what other people thought," Tucker says. "But we also didn't have anyone else's input. We just knew what we wanted to make ourselves happy. There are no slow songs on the record, and we didn't plan that. But we were like a horse that was in its stable, ready to go -- 'We're in this band again, Oh my God!'"
In the 1990s Brownstein and Tucker were students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., amid the punk-feminist ferment of the riot grrrl movement. They both had other bands, but they found synergy when they started writing songs together in 1994. (They used a rehearsal studio on Sleater Kinney Road in nearby Lacey, Wash.) Their music grew more and more unorthodox, moving from the brute-force stomp and blare of punk toward a fiercely convoluted three-way counterpoint of guitars and drums, simultaneously combative and interlocking, full of what Goodmanson called, admiringly, "crazy tangle-note guitar stuff."
The band built a devoted audience on college radio and the indie-rock circuit; it toured arenas with Pearl Jam in 2003. Its last two albums, One Beat in 2002 and The Woods in 2005, each topped the college-radio charts compiled by CMJ for a full four weeks.
"It has been 10 years since The Woods, and a lot has changed on the college radio front since then," says Lisa Hrekso, editor-in-chief of CMJ. "Some of the students staffing college stations were barely in diapers when riot grrrl was smashing glass ceilings. But anyone who hasn't been eager for Sleater-Kinney's return just doesn't realize how much indie rock needs them right now."
Sleater-Kinney songs often have the two guitars chasing each other along jagged trajectories, wrangling back and forth, racing in contrary motion or blitzing with bursts of noise. On the new album, additional layers of guitar and effects bring more barbs. Tucker's lead vocals can sound like a banshee wielding a flamethrower. The women's voices also harmonize, overlap or converge from different directions; the drums kick from below and sometimes erupt. On the new album, as usual, the lyrics have plenty on their mind: love, desire, power, culture, politics, economics, the band itself.
An accidental choice cemented Sleater-Kinney's sound. In her previous band, the guitar-and-drums duo Heavens to Betsy, Tucker had tuned her guitar only to itself. When she joined Brownstein in Sleater-Kinney, they ascertained that Tucker's guitar was tuned with its lowest string at C-sharp, not the standard E. They decided to both keep that tuning, which happens to push Tucker toward the topmost part of her voice.
They are a disparate trio visually and temperamentally. Brownstein is dark and lean, while Tucker is fairer and more cherubic-looking than her vocals would suggest. Weiss doesn't hide a drummer's muscles. Brownstein describes her writing style, not incorrectly, as "loquacious"; Tucker is more succinct, the one who distills songs into titles like "Gimme Love," on the new album.
Sleater-Kinney goes on tour in February, playing large clubs (including Terminal 5 in New York on Feb. 26-27) in the United States and Europe, along with a few theaters. Brownstein then devotes the summer to shooting Portlandia, with more touring afterward. And then, Weiss said, the band will "play it by ear."
Weekend on 01/08/2015