In the rough sketch, a few lines nodded at the inception of Sleater-Kinney, the Pacific Northwest trio that reframed feminist punk for a generation. “Annie was like, ‘Oh, we should expand that so that it actually is the story of the band,’” Tucker recalled. “Like, ‘I think that’s cool, and I think the world would want to hear it.’”
Brownstein added, “She thought about the audience, she thought about the listener in a way that I think we don’t always.”
The result is “Love,” an affectionate catalog of the humilities of indie-rock life — those broke nights sleeping in the tour van — that crescendos into an unyielding bond. “We can be young/We can be old/As long as we have/Each other to hold,” Brownstein sings, as her bandmates provide a chorus with a bright throwback vibe. In Sleater-Kinney fashion, there’s also a turn toward anthemic fury: “Done with being told that this should be the end.”
That narrative might have a different coda now. Not long after the group announced the Aug. 16 record, “The Center Won’t Hold,” Weiss, who has been the propulsive spine of the band since 1996, revealed she was leaving, dissolving one of rock’s most enduring and respected acts.
Since its self-titled 1995 debut, Sleater-Kinney has been revered as one of indie rock's most musically fierce and lyrically sharp bands, cutting a path for passionate musicians who refuse to check their politics or their emotions at the club door. The band’s signature sound — Brownstein and Tucker’s guitars and vocals winding around each other in stinging counterpoint, anchored by Weiss’s deft, thundering drumming — always relied on its precise chemistry. On the eve of its ninth studio album, Sleater-Kinney is now skimmed down to its founding duo, Tucker, 46, and Brownstein, 44.
“The Center Won’t Hold” — a grimy-by-choice release made in response to personal and political turmoil — turned out to be, Brownstein later joked darkly, too prophetic a title: “We should’ve called the record, ‘Let’s Stay Together.’”
And they are: Sleater-Kinney, with a new, yet-to-be-named drummer, will go on tour as scheduled this fall. Some dates overlap with a freshly announced mini-tour by Quasi, Weiss’ other long-running band.
“It’s been a surprising and sad turn of events,” Tucker said, in an interview alongside Brownstein. They had touched down briefly at a hotel restaurant in West Hollywood, California, from Portland, Oregon, their longtime musical home, and were still bristling — tearful but determined — from Weiss’ departure weeks after it became public.
“I’m glad that there’s this record that has her immense drumming on it,” Brownstein said. “But now Corin and I have to kind of clean up the mess of someone leaving after we announced a tour.”
“We have a job to do,” she continued, “and we’re going to do it well, because I feel really lucky to get to do this — like, luckier than I’ve ever been.” Her eyes welled up. “I just realize that there’s nothing that feels like this band. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do it.”
Weiss, 53, declined to comment for this article. In the statement announcing her choice, she said, “The band is heading in a new direction and it is time for me to move on. I will never forget the heights we reached or the magnificent times Corin, Carrie and I shared. We were a force of nature.”
Brownstein said that, in a band get-together after she’d made her decision, Weiss said she hoped they’d remain friends. “Of course,” Brownstein replied. “She’s like my family member.” (Weiss also worked as a location manager on “Portlandia,” Brownstein’s comedy series, for several seasons, including the final one in 2018.)
This unexpected pivot point for Sleater-Kinney arrives when the group has a bigger platform than ever before — because of Brownstein’s TV fame, and because of the reputation they built with some of the most critically acclaimed albums of the last 2 1/2 decades. “We do have more cultural power than we did 25 years ago,” Tucker said. They view it as a responsibility, and an opportunity.
Before the split, the big news about Sleater-Kinney’s next chapter wasn’t about who was missing, but who they’d gained. It’s the first time they’ve entrusted a fellow performer — another woman with a guitar-god reputation and an art-rock flair — with their studio time.
As a teenager, Clark discovered “All Hands on the Bad One,” Sleater-Kinney’s 2000 album, “and promptly went and mail-ordered every other Sleater-Kinney record at the time, had the posters on my wall,” she said in a separate interview.
Clark said it was originally Weiss’ idea for Clark to produce a few songs, and see how it went. In a first, the band’s two songwriters started work not together, but in different cities — Brownstein in LA, where she had been developing another TV show, and Tucker in Portland, where she lives with her husband, director Lance Bangs, and two children.
“They were the classic things that Sleater-Kinney has always done so well, which is great guitar parts and big firework, lightning-in-a-bottle kind of songs,” Clark said, “but then there was this other side that I also felt in the demos — kind of an extra vulnerability from both of them.”
It came through in their vocals and subject matter, which both writers called unusually personal, taking on depression, suicidal thoughts and #MeToo. “Broken,” the wrenching piano ballad that closes the album, invokes Christine Blasey Ford.
Clark, Brownstein said, directed them to “not circumvent the emotion, but actually really delve into it.”
Production-wise, “I remember I was using the word ‘corrosive’ a lot,” Clark said, when she joined the group interview. All three were arrayed in variations on black, white and a pop of red, in escalating levels of glam. “Nice suit,” Brownstein, low-key in a printed button-up, said admiringly of Clark’s slick, sexy-boss black-and-white pinstripe, set off by red heart-shaped sunglasses and a Gucci handbag.
They wanted the album to sound “really gross,” Tucker, in contrasting lacy white, said, as her collaborators mmm-hmmmed in affirmation. “Like, disgusting, dirty, gross, dusty.” She went to a Depeche Mode show and got absorbed by synths; Clark and Brownstein saw Nine Inch Nails, and heard industrial.
The three or so weeks they spent in the studio with Clark were, to hear Brownstein and Tucker tell it, transformative. Choruses and bridges were revised; major keys were introduced; Tucker, whose raging vocals have helped define the group’s sound, sometimes sings two octaves higher than normal.
“She pushed us further,” Tucker said, just as they were ready for someone to challenge their instincts. (The trio similarly left its comfort zone making its sprawling 2005 album “The Woods;” after its bruising tour, they went on hiatus for nearly a decade.)
This time, the band pushed back, too. On the poppy “Love,” Clark questioned a Brownstein lyric: “There’s nothing more frightening and nothin’ more obscene/than a well-worn body demanding to be seen.” It’s essentially the album’s defining statement. Clark and Brownstein exchanged a look when I mentioned the line.
Brownstein: “Annie didn’t want that.”
Clark: “I didn’t object to the sentiment, I think it’s right on. I thought that Carrie was being too self-effacing. I was like, well-worn body? What?”
Brownstein: “Yeah, check out this body! It’s crazy! I mean, my body is perfect, but for you other people out there, with worn bodies, this is for you.” She laughed — she was clearly joking, but also, that really is her bare butt on the cover for the single “Hurry on Home.”
Arguing that they had avoided showing their bodies through their 20s and 30s, and that it would be meaningful to do so north of their 40s, she had briefly tried to convince her bandmates to disrobe, too — “Corin was like, ‘that is a hard pass.’” Brownstein decided to go for it anyway, because the image, with her head on backward, was unsettling rather than sexy.
At the table, Clark was still trying to explain her objection to the lyric as the other women laughed. “I was picturing, like battle wounds, and botched —” she made some flailing hand gestures, which cracked everyone up further. “That’s the only reason I was checking in with you, to make sure that you knew that you were beautiful.”
As collaborators, Brownstein and Clark — who previously dated — are deeply intertwined, with other projects in the works, both said. “There’s no reference that either of us could throw out that the other person didn’t get,” Clark said. “It’s fully just dialed in, and we make each other laugh.”
The dynamic, when all three were together, was a rapid, sharp and frequently hilarious riff on subjects ranging from the media they’d absorbed (which, yes, sometimes felt like a “Portlandia” sketch) to politics (“President Marianne Williamson. I’m trying to get used to it now,” Brownstein kidded) to gender parity in the studio. “We had to have one man in there,” Tucker said of their recording engineer, Cian Riordan. “It’s required by California law.”
Clark also seemed careful not to overstep the bounds of Sleater-Kinney’s partnership. Early in our conversation, she realized that, as primarily a solo artist, she’d hardly fielded interview questions as one among collaborators. “Was that OK?” she mock-whispered, looking to Brownstein, after an answer. “That was great,” Brownstein assured, then couldn’t resist a rimshot: “No.”
A few weeks before Weiss’ departure made headlines — but after her bandmates knew her inclination — Brownstein was sitting, damp after a summer downpour, in a TriBeCa coffee shop, declaiming her pride in the longevity of Sleater-Kinney.
“There’s something about popular forms of music that feels like the only stories that have meaning come from youth,” she said. “But that’s not true. We need women — and all kinds of women — to tell us what it feels like to be on the other side of a year, or a decade, or a struggle. What about my story as a nearly 45-year-old, that’s in an all-female band? There are hardly any all-female bands that have even made it this long.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes more bleakly after Weiss’ exit. Britt Daniel, the Spoon frontman, has known Sleater-Kinney since he befriended Weiss after her first tour with the band in the late ’90s. “Even at that time, they felt legendary to me,” he said. “Like they were coming out of nowhere with this sound that was totally unique and really aggressive. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, I hadn’t heard anything like that before.” (Spoon’s song “Metal School,” he said, “was my interpretation of a Carrie riff.”)
Weiss, who helped sequence the last two Spoon albums — and who masterminded Sleater-Kinney’s set lists — is “good at having a concept of the overall big picture,” said Daniel, who has dealt with lineup changes in his own long-running band. “It just hurts, when it can’t stay together.”
Coming out of the DIY riot grrrl scene that birthed Bikini Kill and other defiantly feminist acts in the ’90s, Sleater-Kinney was primed to buck the system, and defy the misogyny of the music industry.
But the punk ethos also conflicted with their ambition, especially for Brownstein. “Carrie is ultra-ambitious, and I respect that,” Tucker said. During their hiatus, Tucker released two solo albums, and recently began another band, Filthy Friends, with Peter Buck of R.E.M. “I’m better in a collaborative situation,” she said. With Brownstein, after 25 years together, “we’re much more able to share the spotlight.”
Brownstein also found an outlet in creating and starring in “Portlandia” alongside Fred Armisen. It won a Peabody and four Emmys (for costuming and design), gave her a nascent career directing television (“Shrill;” “Search Party;” “Mrs. Fletcher,” a forthcoming Tom Perrotta adaptation for HBO) and almost certainly attracted a bigger audience to Sleater-Kinney. When the group returned with “No Cities to Love” — which The New York Times chief pop music critic Jon Pareles called “the first great album of 2015” — the band noted happily that the fans on that tour were not just nostalgists; they were new.
Now, Sleater-Kinney has rock stature. “We do have conversations about, what are our responsibilities? How do we do this to live up to our ideals?” Tucker said.
It’s something they discussed while conceiving “The Center Won’t Hold.” “This band is always a place for us to go when we feel vulnerable and fragile and angry,” Brownstein said. “It houses emotions that aren’t necessarily sanctioned in our day-to-day life, that people don’t make room for — because we can’t. You wouldn’t function if you allowed the ambient anxiety of the current era to permeate every cell.”
The lyric about the well-worn body was also asking, “How much can any of us withstand right now?” she added later. “All the characters, all the narrators — all of us in this album are seeking a means of resistance and withstanding pain. But I didn’t want to express that in a way that was like a screaming match. I wanted to give people something that buoyed them, that reached a chorus where they could sing together, and sing along with us.”
After “No Cities,” Brownstein made a pilot for Hulu based on her 2015 memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” reliving her origins as a ’90s-bred artist. It didn’t get picked up — and that was the impetus she needed to dive fully back into music again. “The way I want to interact with songwriting is in the present,” she said.
If anything, her vision for the band has grown: “The Center Won’t Hold” is the first Sleater-Kinney album to credit creative directors, including Brownstein’s friend Humberto Leon of the fashion line Opening Ceremony. She wanted to give the group a visual identity, to take ownership of their accomplishments, she said.
“I just want people to be able to carry this around with them, not just on their headphones, but to feel like, when you see Black Flag on something.” (Despite her best efforts, Sleater-Kinney has yet to pick a signature font.)
But the idea that they might be known for their willingness to adventure, experiment and persevere — “those kind of ambitions, I’m interested in,” Brownstein said.
Denying oneself change “isn’t a way to live, or to make things, ever,” she said. “I’d rather take risks. This is the mid-period of this band; it’s going to be expansive, and it’s not going to feel like it did before, because I’m not in the same place. No one in the band is. And there’s just a point where you have to say: Either come with us, or don’t.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.