Earlier this year, seminal punk trio Sleater-Kinney teased us with a snapshot of members Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss posed next to St. Vincent in a recording studio, fuelling rumours that a new album is underway.
As it turns out, the rumours were right: the post-riot-grrrl pioneers are back with track “Hurry on Home” – the first release since their 2015 album No Cities To Love. The announcement comes with a series of cryptic tweets on the band’s Twitter account over the last few hours, each picturing the same image of the band with the words, “UNLOVABLE”, “UNFUCKABLE” and “UNLISTENABLE”, with the same lyrics plastered on billboards across New York and an iPhone-shot music video, directed by Miranda July.
For anyone who’s a fan of the punk trio, it’s safe to say that in this period of societal chaos, the return of Sleater-Kinney’s pummeling, raw sound is welcome, following the group’s four-year hiatus. But the coming album promises a different sound to what we’ve heard before. “Instead of just going into the studio to document what we’d done, we were going in to explore and to find the essence of something. To dig in deeper,” says guitarist Brownstein in the press release. Band singer Corin Tucker adds that working on the new music was “like this manic energy of empowerment”. Whatever it is, we’re ready.
Listen to “Hurry on Home” below.