Sleater-Kinney discuss nostalgia and existing in the present tense

On Sleater-Kinney’s last record, in 2005, the band infamously called nostalgia a whore in their tirade against industry puppets and shameless imitators, ‘Entertain’. Their rhetoric might have softened a little ten years on - mainly through containing fewer cuss-words - but their stance remains firmly the same. “It’s not an interesting place to create from,” says Carrie Brownstein, bluntly. “It’s a rabbit hole to go down a path where [nostalgia’s] a motivating factor, or to be in a place where you feel like the past is better. That’s a very diminished way of existing in the present tense. How can you work from there?” she asks. “How can you make something new if you think everything good has already happened?”

It’s the logic behind why Sleater-Kinney aren’t just back blazing a trail on the reunion circuit, or slapping a greatest hits collection down on the counter. Far from it, they’re back with ‘No Cities To Love’; yet another Sleater-Kinney album that magically seizes on the precise moment it operates within, and creates an entire cracked sonic mirror out of the chaos. “Relevancy is a very important element to longevity,” explains Carrie. The decision to record together again was not one that the band took at all lightly. “It’s been percolating for a few years, and it took a while to carve out the time,” Carrie says. “It wasn’t on some kind of timeline - it could have taken years to write [‘No Cities To Love’]. You know, it had to be very intentional.” “Yeah,” nods Corin Tucker. “We wanted to come out with a new record. We worked on it until we had an album that had something new to say.”

‘No Cities To Love’ certainly has plenty of that, and then some. “I always think of Betty Davis - she’s a funk singer - and she has this song called ‘The Anti-Love Song’,” says Carrie, shedding light on the album title. “It is actually about love, but you put the word ‘no’ in front of it and you still think of all the everywheres and nowheres, and how you sit within a given space, how you relate to context and yourself, and the people you love,” she ponders. “When you tell someone there’s no cities to love, you think about all the cities that you do love. It’s more about claiming the things that you do love, because it forces you to, as a title. You’re like, no! That’s not true! “

Unrest, worry, and barely tensioned anxiety continually threaten to topple over into anger on ‘No Cities To Love’, and it’s characterised by barbed, spiky guitar lines, While Sleater-Kinney’s last record ‘The Woods’ was vast, expansive and cavernous, there’s an almost claustrophobic tautness to its follow-up. “Expansion does not exist on this record,” agrees Carrie, “except in little moments. We wrote it in a very airless, soundproofed space,” she says, referring to her narrow basement space in Portland. “It has an airless quality to it, the playing, which I think has a buttoned up anxiety.”