Cover Feature Sleater-Kinney: Things Fall Apart

As far as apocalyptic images go, the sight of an abandoned falcon circling frantically around a crumbling planet earth must rank fairly high-up on the end-of-the-world scale. It’s the dystopian image that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats famously painted in his 1919 text ‘The Second Coming’, written following the devastation of World War I. Perhaps strangely, the poem has been enjoying a resurgence of late. Artists have been rightfully pilfering Yeats’ words ever since he wrote them, but in recent years these same lines have been widely quoted, like choice lyrics from a number one pop smash - often as a way of making sense of how absurdly cruel the world has become.

In the run-up to Donald Trump’s eventual election in the United States in 2016, certain lines from this poem were quoted more times within seven months than the previous thirty years combined. “The centre cannot hold” has become shorthand for the dangerous, hateful and fractured political climate of the present; switch “cannot” to a slightly more hopeful “won’t” and it’s also a phrase that titles Sleater-Kinney’s ninth album.

A record on the run from chaos, ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ hungers after forming a meaningful connection in this modern void, and often gets nowhere. Ferocious lead single ‘Hurry On Home’ makes itself malleable, offering itself up as a “hair grabbable, grand-slammable” booty call secretly longing for escape: “disconnect me from my bones / So I can float, so I can roam” it pleads. If the beast hunched at the centre of the group’s previous record ‘No Cities To Love’ ached with anger and fury, this new iteration is lonely, adrift, and after something far less rebellious than anarchy or revolution. Instead, it craves warmth.

“There have been moments of total despair,” starts Corin Tucker, taking stock of the last few years, gathered together in London with bandmates Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein.

“Right before we went in to record [‘The Center Won’t Hold], Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed,” she continues, referring to Trump’s pick for the American Supreme Court. Neither the fact that he faced three separate allegations of sexual abuse, nor the brave testimony from Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who spoke publically about being assaulted, could stop Kavanaugh’s nomination being approved. Like the US President, who also faces multiple sexual abuse allegations, he has now been admitted to a position of immense political power. “It was such a knife in the heart, “ Corin continues. “Of course it makes you feel so raw. Thank god we have this band to put those feelings somewhere.”