Exhume Yr Idols

The Instagram post in question is a video shot in her living room during a recent practice session. Through the walls, the band can be heard barreling through "Entertain," an eruptive track from 2005 swan song The Woods. As guitars, drums and Tucker's distinctive wail tangle into a muffled roar, Brownstein's two dogs, Toby and Cricket, sprawl out on a couch, looking thoroughly unentertained.

"The enthusiasm in this video is overwhelming," reads the caption, dripping with the drollness that, in the time since she last stood onstage with Weiss and Tucker, has transformed Brownstein into an unlikely TV star.

Canine disaffection aside, for plenty of humans, the return of Sleater-Kinney is a major cause for excitement. In its initial 12-year run, the band cultivated one of the most worshipful followings in all of indie rock. It personalized the politics of riot grrrl, writing about relationships, abuses of authority, cultural patriarchy and the band itself through a fiercely feminist lens, downplaying polemics and slogans in favor of real-life tales of heartbreak and resolve. 

Over the course of seven acclaimed albums, their music—a brand of guitar-and-drum rock (no bass needed) that always sounded bigger than the sum of its three parts—grew increasingly ambitious, daring and singularly their own. When the group went on "indefinite hiatus" in 2006, Rolling Stone mourned the loss of "America's best punk band," an echo of a less-qualified superlative bestowed on them a few years earlier by legendary critic Greil Marcus, who called Sleater-Kinney the best band in the world, period. At their final shows, many in the crowd wept.

"There was this notion that this whole era was ending," says journalist Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. "It wasn't just them. It was signaling the real, real end of riot grrrl."

And so, to have Sleater-Kinney back means something more than just being able to hear some great songs played live again—it represents a resurrection of the principles that defined a generation of underground music. But nine years is a long time. Is it possible for any band to meet expectations when shouldering not just its own significant legacy but the weight of an entire movement?

A month and a half before their first shows, Brownstein, Tucker and Weiss hardly seem troubled by that question. That's probably because they've already recorded the answer. Released in January, No Cities to Love isn't "a solid effort," "a pleasant surprise" or any of the other soft platitudes typically ascribed to reunion albums. Its 10 songs are as tightly constructed and ferociously performed as anything in their catalog, exuding neither the desperation for relevance nor a complacency to lean on the past. It is an affirmation of everything the band ever stood for, while also proclaiming where the band stands now, as women in their early 40s. It is an album whose relevance is earned just by being really damn good.

All that's left now is to go out and prove it onstage. And there's little question about their ability to do that—hard-to-please pets be damned.

"We're ready," Weiss says. "We hope other people are, too."

It was never that they needed time away from each other. What they needed was a break from Sleater-Kinney.

"The band had become really stressful [for] each of us, for different reasons," Weiss says. "It became a real handful to manage the band the way we wanted it and our lives the way we wanted to do that."

By 2005, Sleater-Kinney hadn't exactly become a big business, but it was certainly a big deal. For The Woods, the band left its longtime label, Kill Rock Stars, for Sub Pop, hired super-producer Dave Fridmann, decamped to upstate New York and pumped up the volume. Sleater-Kinney always enjoyed subverting classic-rock machismo—see Brownstein's onstage Pete Townshend windmills and David Lee Roth high-kicks—but now, they were throwing down the Hammer of the Gods with in-the-red abandon; Tucker's Ann Wilson-gone-punk power-wail had never been better employed. It was their biggest, loudest album to date, and by all accounts, it took a lot out of them. It was a grueling recording process, which carried over into an especially grueling tour. Tucker was struggling being away from her son, Marshall, then 5 years old. Brownstein was suffering frequent panic attacks. Going into the final dates, the band issued a statement, thanking fans and declaring that "[a]s of now, there are no plans for future tours or recording." At their two-night farewell, at Crystal Ballroom, Eddie Vedder opened for them.

"It's sad to say goodbye to something that's been so fulfilling and nourished us in a lot ways, but it seemed like the right thing to do," Weiss says. "I don't think there was any choice, really."

"It was really an organic conversation," Tucker says, recalling the night in early 2012 when the subject was first broached. "Carrie and I were at my house, watching a Portlandia episode my son was in. We were just hanging out and catching up and talking about music, and I was like, 'I wonder if we'll ever do a Sleater-Kinney show again.' So that started the whole conversation. But it took a year to figure out what we were going to do."

One thing was immediately clear, though: If a reunion was going to happen, an album had to come first. So Tucker and Brownstein went down to Brownstein's refurbished basement in Northeast Portland, and spent the next year throwing riffs, lyrics and melodies at each other. "We pored over the arrangements," Brownstein says. "There would be choruses we'd have for a month that I'd listen to and go, 'This isn't good enough. I don't like my melody here. We have to completely change this chorus.'"

A lot has been made of how Sleater-Kinney carried out its reformation "in secret," but it wasn't like the bandmates were sneaking around, disguised in costumes from Portlandia's wardrobe department. They were, in truth, pretty laissez faire about the whole thing, blabbing about it to friends and even journalists who, for whatever reason, kept it to themselves. When Pearl Jam came through Portland in November 2013, all three women got onstage at the Moda Center, joining in on an encore of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World," which, to their alleged surprise, sent the online rumor mill into hyperdrive. 

Still, when the band finally emerged from the basement, ready to go into the studio, it happened so swiftly even collaborators were caught off guard.

"They had gotten in touch with me about mixing some demos they had done, which gave me a raised eyebrow that everyone was together and writing," says producer John Goodmanson. "But really, I got the call on a Monday or Tuesday, and I was in San Francisco by Friday. So when it was go time, it was go time."

For as long as it took to write, No Cities to Love was recorded in just about two weeks. Seven months later, Sub Pop issued a remastered vinyl box set of the Sleater-Kinney discography. Included with it was a surprise 7-inch containing an "unreleased song" called "Bury Our Friends," a midtempo stomper based around an utterly Valhallan Brownstein riff, with lyrics suspiciously centered on the exhumation of idols and pushing forward in the face of adversity. A few days of fervent Internet speculation later, it was confirmed as No Cities' first single. It was the ideal reintroduction for a band that's never been content to stay in one place too long: a song about detaching from one's past, stashed inside a celebration of their own.

"Oftentimes, when bands break up and get back together, it seems they're trying to recapture this old magic they had," says Escobedo Shepherd, a self-proclaimed Sleater-Kinney "super-fan," "and it seems kind of sad at times, like they're trying to re-create something that's been lost."

That fear was not lost on the band. It's precisely why they worked so hard on this album, and why they did so while cloistered away, shielded from any outside influences that might nudge them backward. A major theme of No Cities is facing down institutions of power, and the institution of Sleater-Kinney is not exempt. There are several songs that seem to speak directly to fans, explaining why the band went away and, to a certain extent, why it's back.

There's a lot of "pushing forward," "rising above," and never giving in going on throughout No Cities. People struggle against abstract forces bigger than themselves, from a working mother caught on the post-recession hamster wheel ("Price Tag") to a once-powerful man whose self-worth has been reduced to a "clenched fist on a dangling arm" ("Fangless") to, well, someone who sounds a lot like Tucker, retreating from her own success because "sometimes the heat of the crowd feels a little too close" ("Hey Darling"). But each of those battles is underlined by bold, eruptive defiance, which usually kicks in at the chorus. "We win/ We lose/ Only together do we break the rules," Tucker and Brownstein sing on "Surface Envy," as Weiss' gale-force drums tumble down around them. If there was any concern that Brownstein's fame would overshadow the trio as a whole, it should be assuaged by how often her voice locks in with Tucker's. In the past, their relationship on record was often combative, with Tucker's banshee caterwauling pushing against Brownstein's angular phrasing. On No Cities, they seem to be making a point of taking on the album's myriad challenges together, in literal harmony.

It sounds like the work of a band that's come back to stay. But the future of Sleater-Kinney, at this point, remains unclear. Come summer, the band will go back on temporary hold, as Brownstein films the next season of Portlandia. Tucker still has two young kids at home. The external priorities that ended the band 10 years ago have not gone away. "Fade," No Cities' lurching, lighters-up finale, seems to imply that you should enjoy this reunion while this lasts: "If there's no tomorrow," Tucker sings, "you better live."

"When you're in a band, you don't really plan that far in advance," Weiss says. "Most people can play their lives, they have a map. When you're in a band, you give that up. But I think the idea of doing the same thing over and over again is not that enticing to any of us.” 

The full version of this article originally ran in the March-April 2015 edition of American Songwriter. Go here for a list of top 5 Sleater-Kinney landmarks.

SEE IT: Sleater-Kinney plays Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., with THEESatisfaction, on Tuesday, May 5. 8 pm. Sold out. All ages.

WWeek 2015