‘It feels so arbitrary, to be alive’: Sleater-Kinney on the lessons of grief – and how music healed them | Pop and rock

Fifteen years ago, Carrie Brownstein, one half of feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney, was getting her hair cut when rowdy guitars started blaring through the salon’s speakers. What is this song, she thought, and who is this woman screaming? It took her a further 15 seconds to realise that the roars belonged to her bandmate, Corin Tucker. Their sound was scrappier than Brownstein remembered. The song she’d struggled to recognise? Dig Me Out: a galloping three-minute track that catapulted the band to international acclaim in 1997.

“We’ve been doing this for so long,” Brownstein smiles on a rainy afternoon in London. Brownstein and Tucker were barely out of their teens when they came up with a “fly-by-night” name for what they imagined would be a fleeting venture, inspired by the sign for Sleater Kinney Road near their practice space in the Washington suburb of Olympia. Little did they know, three decades on, they’d still be here. “It’s kind of amazing,” Tucker says, “but we’ve also nurtured it.”

In their earliest days, Sleater-Kinney were a post-riot grrrl band raging against patriarchal hypocrisy. By the time of Dig Me Out – and the album of the same name – they had begun boldly experimenting with rock classicism: subverting girl-group pop on 2000’s All Hands on the Bad One; plying stormy political epics on 2005’s The Woods, their last album before going on hiatus until 2014. In this second phase – now a duo since the departure of drummer Janet Weiss in 2019 – they are still evolving and refusing to conform.

Days before our interview, at a packed gig at London’s Roundhouse, I watch this dynamic play out. With three additional female band members, they careen through the mid-90s jangle of One More Hour (about the end of Brownstein and Tucker’s short-lived romantic relationship), the playful harmonies of 2002’s Oh!, a tender rendition of 2005’s Modern Girl, as well as songs from their 11th studio album, Little Rope, due in January. Brownstein, clad in Jarvis Cocker-esque flares, arches and lunges with her guitar, while Tucker’s kineticism is channelled through her combustible vocals.

Their recent shows have taken on a new significance. “I didn’t know what it would be like on stage after my mother died,” Brownstein says, sitting beside Tucker in a hotel bar four days after the gig. That moment in the salon chair isn’t the only time Brownstein has approached Dig Me Out with renewed ears. When she was bereaved last year, its primal lyrics manifested into something deeper and more profound. “When Corin starts singing, ‘Dig me out’, I think: please, pull me through this. Extract me from this horror, this mess, this ugliness.”

While Sleater-Kinney’s previous album Path of Wellness came out of the collective grief of the Covid pandemic, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland (where Brownstein and Tucker live) and the wildfires that burned the Oregon hills, their 2024 follow-up is coloured by a more singular loss. In autumn 2022, Brownstein received a call. Her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while on holiday in Italy.

She and Tucker were five songs into a new album. “I don’t think there was ever a question that we would stop recording,” says Brownstein. “I really needed to keep going.” Lost in grief, the only thing that made sense was the instinctive act of playing her guitar. Instead of bringing home-cooked meals to console her, Tucker would regularly send over a chorus or melody, and Brownstein “would just sit with it for hours, all day really, re-harmonising the chords,” she recalls. “I guess it felt like praying.” Feeling untethered and numb, the physicality of touch reminded Brownstein that she was still capable of existing. “Grief is intangible and you feel so incoherent, right? There is a before and after and you can’t reconcile it. It’s not like a broken leg or something that will heal. It’s just gone.”

The restorative power of touch is a common narrative in grief: a state of unbeing that feels less like a broken leg and more like a phantom limb. I wonder if it’s changed her playing. “I think I’ve learned to appreciate the presence of [the guitar],” Brownstein answers after a brief pause. “It was something I used to play when I was a kid …” Her voice breaks and she starts to cry, seemingly taken by surprise. “Sorry,” she whispers and reaches for a tissue. Tucker strokes her hand. “When you lose a parent you grieve for them from all ages. There’s so much of me that was grieving my mom from my younger self.” When Brownstein was a shy teenager, the guitar was “a way for me to convey my feelings and ideas when verbally I was less able,” she says. “And because I was returning to a time that felt inexplicable I thought of the guitar as language again.”

As the duo continued recording, sometimes the quieter songs transformed into something more jubilant. Tucker gives the example of Say It Like You Mean It, an anthem full of heart and longing. It started out as a “small idea”, she says. Then she realised her delivery was too soft to reflect the pain and anguish she was witnessing in her friend. “All of those peaks and valleys are reflected on every song on the record, because when you get older you experience all of that,” she says.

There is a tonal urgency to their newest record that echoes the propulsion they feel as they reach their 50s: Brownstein is 49, Tucker 51. “After my mom died, I was having a lot of panic attacks,” Brownstein says. Coming out the other side of that, she felt compelled to make it count. “I think when you lose someone, especially so suddenly, there is this disbelief that you’re even standing up and speaking sentences.” As Brownstein underlines several times during our conversation, death is really the only certainty in life: “It feels so arbitrary sometimes, to be alive.” Something about this makes her feel giddy – especially when she’s on stage. “Like, can you believe it?” she exclaims, eyes wide. “Can you believe that we’re all here and we’ve all survived this show?”

Like Brownstein’s renewed connection to her guitar, Tucker’s relationship to her famously clarion voice is changing, too. A fan of the “big voices” of Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin, her first memory was singing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs with her father, a keen folk singer, in North Dakota. “No wonder I have the job that I do,” she laughs, turning to Brownstein for corroboration. “My dad brought the ethos around music from the 60s to me, the idea that people were singing about a world they wanted to change for the better.”

It’s not a huge leap to connect this approach to the groundbreaking feminist work that followed, which has evolved as they have. Whether it’s tackling rape culture early on, gender-based double standards (2021’s Complex Female Characters) or reflecting on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh (2019 piano ballad Broken), the spirit of protest has always been at the heart of Sleater-Kinney’s music. That urge to keep agitating is also evident in their creativity – and for some fans, therein lies the rub. In 2019, Sleater-Kinney split fans following Weiss’s departure and the release of what critics dubbed their most “arty” and “sleek” offering, The Center Won’t Hold, produced by St Vincent (AKA Annie Clark). I wonder how they feel about the expectations placed on them to “stay on brand” with their continuing output. “It’s confusing because even back then we didn’t do what people wanted,” Brownstein says. “When we made The Hot Rock [in 1999] it sounded so different from Dig Me Out. It was contemplative.”

Tucker jumps in: “Dark!” Brownstein laughs. “Dark,” she repeats with a playful drawl. “We’ve always bucked the trend and pushed back on the idea that we’re just going to be some band that made the same iteration of a record time after time.”

Tucker agrees. “We are such a weird band that all the hand-wringing over changes or additions, I don’t quite understand it.” Are they writing in reaction to all that? No, Brownstein says. “But I also don’t like to be underestimated.” She recognises where this expectation comes from. “I understand that people have a hard time with change, especially going through such a loss. I have more empathy for people who are trying to hold on to an idea of something that makes them feel safe. But I would offer that that is a false illusion – and I can’t play into it.”

In recent years, much has been made of the band’s peerlessness as women their age in rock music – as if to stand on stage thrashing a guitar is a provocative act. Does this irritate them? “We’ve always seen ourselves as unconventional women,” Tucker says. “So now that we’re unconventional older women, it’s just another small hurdle.” The lay of the land, as Brownstein sees it, is that “there aren’t tons of people still playing music like we are”. Recently they saw Shirley Manson on stage, which was “really great”, and Brownstein learned that Joan Armatrading has written her first symphony. “She’s fearless. These are the people I admire.” We should be celebrating longevity, Brownstein proffers. “I hope we get to see Beyoncé 20 years from now. Why do we wish that artists would stop? It’s a strange impulse to wish for the cessation of creativity and performance, and to diminish stories from the other end of life’s spectrum. That’s a cynical mindset.”

Bearing this in mind, does she still see herself up there, lunging in her flares, well into her 70s? They both cackle. “Oh my God, I really hope those pants survive,” says Brownstein. “If they do, I will too.” Post-hiatus, they say, making music means so much more. “When you’re young, that kind of success seems so natural but it’s much rarer than you think,” says Tucker. “When we came back, we were like, maybe we didn’t realise how special it was.” There was the future to consider, too. “What kind of potential did we not actually achieve?”

A decade later, I get the sense that this question is still a pursuit in flux. “We might be the only ones who can tell this story this way,” Brownstein says. “So let’s see what else we have left to say.”

Little Rope is released via Loma Vista on 19 January.

Fifteen years ago, Carrie Brownstein, one half of feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney, was getting her hair cut when rowdy guitars started blaring through the salon’s speakers. What is this song, she thought, and who is this woman screaming? It took her a further 15 seconds to realise that the roars belonged to her bandmate, Corin Tucker. Their sound was scrappier than Brownstein remembered. The song she’d struggled to recognise? Dig Me Out: a galloping three-minute track that catapulted the band to international acclaim in 1997.

“We’ve been doing this for so long,” Brownstein smiles on a rainy afternoon in London. Brownstein and Tucker were barely out of their teens when they came up with a “fly-by-night” name for what they imagined would be a fleeting venture, inspired by the sign for Sleater Kinney Road near their practice space in the Washington suburb of Olympia. Little did they know, three decades on, they’d still be here. “It’s kind of amazing,” Tucker says, “but we’ve also nurtured it.”

In their earliest days, Sleater-Kinney were a post-riot grrrl band raging against patriarchal hypocrisy. By the time of Dig Me Out – and the album of the same name – they had begun boldly experimenting with rock classicism: subverting girl-group pop on 2000’s All Hands on the Bad One; plying stormy political epics on 2005’s The Woods, their last album before going on hiatus until 2014. In this second phase – now a duo since the departure of drummer Janet Weiss in 2019 – they are still evolving and refusing to conform.

Days before our interview, at a packed gig at London’s Roundhouse, I watch this dynamic play out. With three additional female band members, they careen through the mid-90s jangle of One More Hour (about the end of Brownstein and Tucker’s short-lived romantic relationship), the playful harmonies of 2002’s Oh!, a tender rendition of 2005’s Modern Girl, as well as songs from their 11th studio album, Little Rope, due in January. Brownstein, clad in Jarvis Cocker-esque flares, arches and lunges with her guitar, while Tucker’s kineticism is channelled through her combustible vocals.

Their recent shows have taken on a new significance. “I didn’t know what it would be like on stage after my mother died,” Brownstein says, sitting beside Tucker in a hotel bar four days after the gig. That moment in the salon chair isn’t the only time Brownstein has approached Dig Me Out with renewed ears. When she was bereaved last year, its primal lyrics manifested into something deeper and more profound. “When Corin starts singing, ‘Dig me out’, I think: please, pull me through this. Extract me from this horror, this mess, this ugliness.”

While Sleater-Kinney’s previous album Path of Wellness came out of the collective grief of the Covid pandemic, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland (where Brownstein and Tucker live) and the wildfires that burned the Oregon hills, their 2024 follow-up is coloured by a more singular loss. In autumn 2022, Brownstein received a call. Her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while on holiday in Italy.

She and Tucker were five songs into a new album. “I don’t think there was ever a question that we would stop recording,” says Brownstein. “I really needed to keep going.” Lost in grief, the only thing that made sense was the instinctive act of playing her guitar. Instead of bringing home-cooked meals to console her, Tucker would regularly send over a chorus or melody, and Brownstein “would just sit with it for hours, all day really, re-harmonising the chords,” she recalls. “I guess it felt like praying.” Feeling untethered and numb, the physicality of touch reminded Brownstein that she was still capable of existing. “Grief is intangible and you feel so incoherent, right? There is a before and after and you can’t reconcile it. It’s not like a broken leg or something that will heal. It’s just gone.”

The restorative power of touch is a common narrative in grief: a state of unbeing that feels less like a broken leg and more like a phantom limb. I wonder if it’s changed her playing. “I think I’ve learned to appreciate the presence of [the guitar],” Brownstein answers after a brief pause. “It was something I used to play when I was a kid …” Her voice breaks and she starts to cry, seemingly taken by surprise. “Sorry,” she whispers and reaches for a tissue. Tucker strokes her hand. “When you lose a parent you grieve for them from all ages. There’s so much of me that was grieving my mom from my younger self.” When Brownstein was a shy teenager, the guitar was “a way for me to convey my feelings and ideas when verbally I was less able,” she says. “And because I was returning to a time that felt inexplicable I thought of the guitar as language again.”

As the duo continued recording, sometimes the quieter songs transformed into something more jubilant. Tucker gives the example of Say It Like You Mean It, an anthem full of heart and longing. It started out as a “small idea”, she says. Then she realised her delivery was too soft to reflect the pain and anguish she was witnessing in her friend. “All of those peaks and valleys are reflected on every song on the record, because when you get older you experience all of that,” she says.

There is a tonal urgency to their newest record that echoes the propulsion they feel as they reach their 50s: Brownstein is 49, Tucker 51. “After my mom died, I was having a lot of panic attacks,” Brownstein says. Coming out the other side of that, she felt compelled to make it count. “I think when you lose someone, especially so suddenly, there is this disbelief that you’re even standing up and speaking sentences.” As Brownstein underlines several times during our conversation, death is really the only certainty in life: “It feels so arbitrary sometimes, to be alive.” Something about this makes her feel giddy – especially when she’s on stage. “Like, can you believe it?” she exclaims, eyes wide. “Can you believe that we’re all here and we’ve all survived this show?”

Like Brownstein’s renewed connection to her guitar, Tucker’s relationship to her famously clarion voice is changing, too. A fan of the “big voices” of Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin, her first memory was singing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs with her father, a keen folk singer, in North Dakota. “No wonder I have the job that I do,” she laughs, turning to Brownstein for corroboration. “My dad brought the ethos around music from the 60s to me, the idea that people were singing about a world they wanted to change for the better.”

It’s not a huge leap to connect this approach to the groundbreaking feminist work that followed, which has evolved as they have. Whether it’s tackling rape culture early on, gender-based double standards (2021’s Complex Female Characters) or reflecting on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh (2019 piano ballad Broken), the spirit of protest has always been at the heart of Sleater-Kinney’s music. That urge to keep agitating is also evident in their creativity – and for some fans, therein lies the rub. In 2019, Sleater-Kinney split fans following Weiss’s departure and the release of what critics dubbed their most “arty” and “sleek” offering, The Center Won’t Hold, produced by St Vincent (AKA Annie Clark). I wonder how they feel about the expectations placed on them to “stay on brand” with their continuing output. “It’s confusing because even back then we didn’t do what people wanted,” Brownstein says. “When we made The Hot Rock [in 1999] it sounded so different from Dig Me Out. It was contemplative.”

Tucker jumps in: “Dark!” Brownstein laughs. “Dark,” she repeats with a playful drawl. “We’ve always bucked the trend and pushed back on the idea that we’re just going to be some band that made the same iteration of a record time after time.”

Tucker agrees. “We are such a weird band that all the hand-wringing over changes or additions, I don’t quite understand it.” Are they writing in reaction to all that? No, Brownstein says. “But I also don’t like to be underestimated.” She recognises where this expectation comes from. “I understand that people have a hard time with change, especially going through such a loss. I have more empathy for people who are trying to hold on to an idea of something that makes them feel safe. But I would offer that that is a false illusion – and I can’t play into it.”

In recent years, much has been made of the band’s peerlessness as women their age in rock music – as if to stand on stage thrashing a guitar is a provocative act. Does this irritate them? “We’ve always seen ourselves as unconventional women,” Tucker says. “So now that we’re unconventional older women, it’s just another small hurdle.” The lay of the land, as Brownstein sees it, is that “there aren’t tons of people still playing music like we are”. Recently they saw Shirley Manson on stage, which was “really great”, and Brownstein learned that Joan Armatrading has written her first symphony. “She’s fearless. These are the people I admire.” We should be celebrating longevity, Brownstein proffers. “I hope we get to see Beyoncé 20 years from now. Why do we wish that artists would stop? It’s a strange impulse to wish for the cessation of creativity and performance, and to diminish stories from the other end of life’s spectrum. That’s a cynical mindset.”

Bearing this in mind, does she still see herself up there, lunging in her flares, well into her 70s? They both cackle. “Oh my God, I really hope those pants survive,” says Brownstein. “If they do, I will too.” Post-hiatus, they say, making music means so much more. “When you’re young, that kind of success seems so natural but it’s much rarer than you think,” says Tucker. “When we came back, we were like, maybe we didn’t realise how special it was.” There was the future to consider, too. “What kind of potential did we not actually achieve?”

A decade later, I get the sense that this question is still a pursuit in flux. “We might be the only ones who can tell this story this way,” Brownstein says. “So let’s see what else we have left to say.”

Little Rope is released via Loma Vista on 19 January.