“With their brilliant new album… Sleater-Kinney’s defiantly feminist brand of punk remains vital as ever, 25 years after they began making music”– The Saturday Paper
“Sleater-Kinney haven’t shed a gram of quality since their ’95 debut. LP9 is another bullseye on their dartboard, juggling riotous bouts of fretboard abuse with opulent theatrics.” – Australian Guitar
“As usual, Sleater-Kinney are making (and breaking) their own road rules.”– The Music, 4 stars
“Sleater-Kinney may be almost three decades into their career, but this record is all the proof you need to see that they’re still as vital as ever.” – STACK
Sleater-Kinney release their eagerly awaited 10th album, The Center Won’t Hold, via Milk! Records / Remote Control. Produced by the Grammy Award-winning St. Vincent, the record is their first since 2015’s No Cities to Love.
One of the most influential female bands of the last two decades, Sleater-Kinney continue to evolve and push boundaries. Critics agree; they just graced the cover of The New York Times “Arts & Leisure,”who declared they are “one of rock’s most enduring and respected acts” – read the story here. The FADER said The Center Won’t Hold is “one of the most furious, dynamic records of their career,”and Entertainment Weekly raved, “While their feminist punk ethos and electric, nervy tension are still well intact, Center pushes Sleater-Kinney into all sorts of new sonic territory…The album also features some of the most fragile, expansive songwriting of the band’s career.”
On release day, the band also shared a new music video for the track ‘Love‘ – watch it here. Sleater-Kinney enlisted fans to submit photos with friends, collaborators and mentors, inclusive of duos, trios and groups. The band also asked fans to submit photos that “celebrate your body as a means of resistance”as well as photos that simply “celebrate your body, in whatever that means to you.”
Earlier this week, Sleater-Kinney also shared an intimate and stripped-back performance clip for the track, ‘Broken,’ watch it here.
Grammy.com stated, “For all the changes, The Center Won’t Hold is still very much a Sleater-Kinney record—bold and feminist and unrelenting. It ends with a gut-punch, the piano ballad ‘Broken,’ where Tucker sings, ‘Me, me too / My body cried out,’ inspired in part by the #MeToo movement and the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. It’s a bleak way to leave listeners, but it’s an important one.”
The Center Won’t Hold bursts with noise, raw tender feeling, pain and epic production. Marked by dualities and contradictions, it is both a political and personal record from founding members Carrie Brownstein (guitars/vocals) and Corin Tucker (guitars/vocals). Celebrated feminist icons, Sleater-Kinney have changed the landscape of rock and roll, and continue to challenge themselves and break all the rules.
Corin explains the album process, “I think that, just to be super pragmatic about it, we usually have written together in the same room, writing songs on guitar. But that wasn’t practical because Carrie was working in LA and I was in Portland and my family is here. So we decided to start writing songs, each of us coming up with a demo on our computers, which we’d never done before.” She adds, “It was almost like being high and working on these songs, it was exactly the antidote to the feeling. It was like this manic energy of empowerment and being held in the world. Being able to bring love as this kind of antidote to everything we were going through was really clarifying.”
Carrie comments, “we’re always aware of the sense, as women who are not in our 30’s anymore, that there’s this idea that sonically you’re supposed to contract after a while, and make things that are more appeasing or quieter. I think we’ve always fought against that. It’s also just not in our nature. The alchemy of this band is just not something that coheres around subtlety or quietness. I think on this record, it’s our tenth record, and we are conscious of the fact that there’s not a lot of precedent for continuing to make music as you age. Particularly for an all-female band. There are not a lot of contemporaries who have made this many records. We don’t want to go quietly into the night. You want to lay down tracks for the people behind you, so it could feel like this journey does not end at a certain age.”
