'We Have To Deliver The Best Versions Of Ourselves To This Band'

In 2006, when Sleater-Kinney played the final public show of their original tenure as a band (which had began back in 1994 in Olympia, WA) at the Chicago leg of the Lollapalooza festival, it still didn’t seem like we’d seen the last of them. They’d already made it well known that they were taking an extended, indefinite break – the official line being that there were “no plans for future tours or recordings” – but it still seemed for some nebulous reason that they were leaving behind unfinished business. The trio – Corin Tucker (vocals/guitar), Carrie Brownstein (guitar/vocals) and Janet Weiss (drums) – had released seven increasingly acclaimed albums, in the process evolving from their ragged riot grrrl beginnings into a bona fide world-class rock band in their own right, and despite their announcement to the contrary it still seemed like they were taking a well-earned break rather than hammering nails into any coffins.

Even in the intervening years as the individual members creatively spread their wings chasing other artistic pursuits – Tucker making two solid records as the Corin Tucker Band (2010’s 1,000 Years and 2012’s Kill My Blues), Brownstein creating and starring in smash TV comedy Portlandia as well as forming rock outfit Wild Flag (who released a sole eponymous album in 2011) while Weiss drummed in Wild Flag as well as undertaking stints behind the skins with Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks and her alma mater Quasi – a return to Sleater-Kinney still always on the cards for some undesignated point down the track. It wasn’t entirely inevitable, but close enough.

We figured, ‘Why come back unless we’re going to make a great record?’ – that was the thought.

What wasn’t expected, however, was that they would return fully activated like a bolt from the blue clutching a brand new long-player, which is what eventually transpired late last year. In October, it was announced that not only were Sleater-Kinney once more an ongoing concern but that their eighth album, No Cities To Love, would drop in January, prompting an unparalleled frenzy of excitement and anticipation from their ever-adoring fanbase. The album had been recorded in a shroud of secrecy – mostly in San Francisco, but augmented by sessions in Portland and Seattle – and is far from being the product of a band going through the motions so that they had product to flog upon their return: this is a vibrant, thrilling statement of intent up there with the best work of their esteemed catalogue. We knew Sleater-Kinney had too much integrity to merely phone in such an important piece of art – No Cities To Love in effect validating their position as a powerful creative entity, the band unable to exist in the realms of mere nostalgia purely by dint of their nature – yet for them to re-enter the spotlight armed with such an authoritative collection verges on stunning.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Weiss smiles of the resurrection. “For us it’s been a few years, for you it’s only been a short time. We really tried [to make No Cities To Love as good as it could be]. We figured, ‘Why come back unless we’re going to make a great record?’ – that was the thought.”

It’s on record now that the impetus for the reformation came from a casual conversation between Tucker and Brownstein, Weiss then being phoned to gauge her interest, but the drummer explains that she wasn’t thrown by either the call nor its nature.

“Well, I had been playing in Wild Flag with Carrie, and that was sort of winding down, so I guess I wasn’t totally surprised, but I wasn’t expecting it, I don’t think, at that moment,” she recalls. “But it was a pleasant surprise. There are a lot of logistics to our lives now, and it became more and more real as we wrote more songs. I think we were at first just going to see what happened – just get together and see how the writing went – and as the songs developed I think it became more and more a real possibility.”

What was the reasoning behind the secrecy and subterfuge?

“The plan was just no not tell anybody,” Weiss laughs. “There was two years from when we started writing to when the album was done – a full two years – so obviously a lot of our friends knew. I just think that the people that we did tell just didn’t make a big deal about it. At first we wanted to make sure that the material we were coming up with was good enough, and then we just thought it would be really fun to have some sort of mysterious, surprising way of coming back.

"I think it was Sub Pop who had the idea of putting the Bury Our Friends unmarked seven-inch in the Start Together boxset [the career-spanning collection which also dropped last October], and it was worth keeping it a secret so that the first people who would hear the new music were the fans – they would get their boxset and find this little gem inside which they weren’t exactly sure what it was. Then suddenly they were all talking about it and wondering about it, so instead of posting it on a website or having to go through some commercial channel there was just a direct dialogue between us and the fans, which I think we really enjoyed.”

It’s incredible that they actually managed to keep such a big piece of a news secret in this day and age of heightened awareness of just about everything.

“Yeah, I know!” Weiss chuckles. “Carrie and Corin said that they were telling everyone! I kept it a pretty good secret, I gotta say – I did a pretty good job – but they said they were blabbing all over town so I don’t know how it didn’t get out. I think our fallback was that if we don’t say anything then it could just be rumour – Carrie even hinted at it in several interviews, she could barely keep it under her hat. It was difficult.”

Once the decision was made to get the band back together, Weiss believes that their creative chemistry returned pretty effortlessly, all things considered.

We wanted the record to have an edge and to be sort of dark and vital and desperate.

“It took a little bit of reacquainting, especially Carrie and Corin, who play in such an intricate and involved manner, where one guitar player really relies on the other guitar player to complete phrases and to complete the ideas,” she explains. “I think that with the language that they have, they needed to spend some time sharpening that and reacquainting the guitar playing with each other. But once that started clicking a lot of material started to emerge.”

Did they have any spoken or articulated agendas about what they were aiming for with the new material or did they just get down to the task of creating music and go with flow?

“As you can hear, we wanted the record to have an edge and to be sort of dark and vital and desperate – we wanted things clawing to be heard – but other than that so much time had passed that it was easier to not be as reactionary to the most recent album as we had been in the past,” Weiss ponders. “We were in such an album-touring cycle for so long that we would always try to do something different to what we had done previously – we always push ourselves to do something unique and that we haven’t done before – so that is the same with every record. But, with this record, we just knew especially that it had to be great – there couldn’t be any grey area as to whether we had succeeded or not.

“I think the three of us always have that [desire for quality] on all the records. We write in a very insular way without much outside influence; it’s just us in a basement – a really small, airless space – and we’re really just sort of digging deep and expressing ourselves without really thinking too much about where it’s going or what it’s going to be. And once we have some material we’ll sort of look at it, and on this record we were very critical, we really edited a lot of the songs and kept pushing, like, ‘This has to be better, this has to be better, this chorus could be better’. We threw away a lot of material in the hope of making something really tightly packed – a dense, rich album which doesn’t have any filler on it.”

No Cities To Love is fairly unrelenting (in a good way), with nary a ballad or slow song to be heard – was it always going to be a completely up-tempo beast?

“Pretty much, yeah,” Weiss admits. “I mean, if someone had come in with a slow song we would have tried it, but we weren’t feeling that this time.”

What about the unabashed energy and conviction? The album has an urgency belying their position as a band taking their first tentative steps in return from a lengthy lay-off.

When your music can actually move someone and have meaning in someone’s life, that’s the best thing and it’s reason to do it.

“That is basically the entity that is Sleater-Kinney – it’s sort of beyond us as individuals,” Weiss continues. “It has this collective life – it has a life of its own, it feels like, the band – and we in a way have to live up to it. We have to deliver the best versions of ourselves to this band, which is why it’s very special. It takes a certain amount of energy and muscle to make this thing happen in the way that it does.”

Were they conscious of how important the band is as an entity to so many people when they embarked on this creative process?

“It’s important to us, and I think we have such great fans – the relationship with the fans means so much to us,” Weiss reflects.

“When your music can actually move someone and have meaning in someone’s life, that’s the best thing and it’s reason to do it. It connects us to the world and it connects us to other people, so I think that we’re really fortunate that people respond to our music in that way – they really internalise the music, and the music is incredibly powerful to them. I don’t really think about it all the time, but it’s mostly at shows that I’ll meet fans – I’ll meet people after the show – and you can see it. And we can feel it while we’re playing. At the live shows it’s palpable, the energy between the crowd and us, and how it’s an exchange of that energy – it means a lot to us too.”

Remarkably, in their absence, the stature of Sleater-Kinney in the eyes of their fans (and the music world in general) seemed to increase rather than diminish – partly, this can be explained by the traction of Portlandia and the other musical projects, but a lot of it has to be attributed to the band’s principles, integrity and politics as well as the music.

“I know, we’re lucky!” Weiss marvels. “We’re lucky that people didn’t forget about us. There’s been so much love and excitement, and I think that we really felt a responsibility to do right by our fans and put everything we had into this record so we could give our fans something that’s really high-quality – we really wanted to do that.”

Weiss herself contributes some fantastic drumming over the course of No Cities…, was it fun hitting hard again after the relative nuance required for projects such as Quasi and The Jicks?

“Oh yeah, it’s very muscular,” she laughs. “It’s really high-power. For this album even practicing the songs from the record it feels like I have to deliver a performance on the songs. I can hear it on the tracks that I got to a certain inspired place playing, and they just sort of require that. But yeah, I’m definitely a slammer – I enjoy hitting hard, that’s kind of my thing. I’m very much at home beating the crap out of the drums. With The Jicks I think I was always hitting too hard for those guys, they were, like, ‘Quiet down! Calm down back there! Jeez’, and I’m, like, ‘Let’s go, c’mon!’ I can do other things, but I do really enjoy just smashing the drums.”

Did she enjoy those other forays while Sleater-Kinney was slumbering?

There are certain types of music that you just have to have a bass player, but I just feel that you make what you have work and a lot of times you’re better off for it .

“Oh yeah, I feel like the more people I play with the more I learn about music and drumming and myself. Especially because I get to play with some really great people and musicians and songwriters, so I think it makes me a better player and a better person.”

Weiss explains that drumming in a trio with two guitarists isn’t that different to the norm, mainly because the distinctive Sleater-Kinney aesthetic isn’t that far removed from a traditional rhythm section anyway. 

“Well, Corin is essentially at times a bass player – they tune down pretty low – and especially on the new record there’s some pretty serious bass lines on there, they’re just being played on the guitar,” she offers. “I personally don’t like the low end very much – the sound of it, that big booming sound – so I can’t say that I miss playing with a bass player. There are certain types of music that you just have to have a bass player, but I just feel that you make what you have work and a lot of times you’re better off for it because you have a more unique sound right out of the gate.

"But I feel like the people I play with where there’s no bass – Quasi and Sleater-Kinney – there are bass melodies, lower melodies that I can sort of play with as I would a bass, so it’s not like I ever think about it very much. Usually I don’t think about it all. I enjoyed playing with Joanna [Bolme – The Jicks’ bassist], she was in Quasi for years and she’s a great bass player – and a great guitar player too – so a lot of what she does is kind of guitar-like as well. I just like playing with creative people and people who are obviously trying to make great music.”

And now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted and No Cities To Love is finally in circulation, Weiss concedes that Sleater-Kinney are now pumped to get back on the road to test the new tunes in the live setting (with an Aussie return definitely in the pipeline for some point down the track).

“Very much so,” she smiles. “We have not played the new songs live – that’s the first time that we’ve ever made a record without having played the songs first in front of an audience, so it’s going to be exciting for us to try these out onstage. I think they’ll slot in pretty well, I hope so!”