Little Rope
By Sleater-Kinney
After a decade-long recording hiatus, Sleater-Kinney – the core band of Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss from Olympia, Washington – returned with 2015′s impressive No Cities to Love, although there have been uneven returns since. Path of Wellness (2021), after the departure of drummer Weiss, was a creative dip.
Originally associated with the riot grrrl movement, Sleater-Kinney delivered a distinctive mix of the personal and political welded to alt-rock and explosive grunge. It subsequently found them a mainstream rock audience, helped by Brownstein’s profile as a comedic actor and writer.
They have more recently added a melodic New Wave approach to their armoury, so Little Rope – their 11th album since their 1995 self-titled debut – is a heady infusion, sometimes chaotically gripping and full of jarring sonic and lyrical juxtapositions.
This album can’t have been easy: Brownstein’s mother and stepfather were killed in a car crash in Italy in late 2022. Given that, you’d expect the opener, Hell, to be a scream of anguish but it opens with low, ominous guitar to pull the listener in: “Hell don’t have no worries, Hell don’t have no past, Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path …” Then it explodes with a desperate roar, “You ask ‘Why’, like there’s no tomorrow.”
The issues of loss, emotional damage and contemporary uncertainty are everywhere: “I get up, make a list [of] what I’ll do, once I’m fixed …” (Don’t Feel Right). But most of these raw emotions are surprisingly framed in recognisable and approachable structures: Needlessly Wild recalls Lena Lovich; Small Finds echoes Sonic Youth; the radio-friendly Say It Like You Mean It – “go softly with me, my heart is raw, too many losses” – is at the intersection of power-pop, alt-rock and desperate New Wave, as is Hunt You Down: “I’m locking the room, I’m not ready. Sorrow hides outside the door.”
There are lesser moments (the lyrically well-intentioned but mundane Crusaders) and Weiss’s replacement, touring drummer Angie Boylan, lacks the nuance of her predecessor.
Little Rope is more musically accessible than its backstory might suggest, too much so for original fans perhaps, but there’s still that keen Sleater-Kinney intelligence in play, notably in Brownstein’s distinctively aggressive and cathartic guitar attack.
Down There!
By Folly Group
Voices from the 80s/90s underground inspire this intense London quartet whose debut album rides off strident percussion, skeletal guitars, electronica dance beats, rousing chants and that manic, focused post-punk energy familiar from the Pop Group, our Skeptics, the wound-up tautness of Television, Gang of Four and more recently Yard Act and Young Fathers.
However, alongside the abrasive I’ll Do What I Can (“no greater favour one can do than try to understand”) is the measured speak-sing of Bright Night about the anxieties and alienation of London life, the otherworld electronica of Nest, wide-screen gothic gloom on New Feature, the dubbed-up urgent story of Strange Neighbour and pop elements nailing down Freeze.
Folly Group have taken their mashed-up sound from East London clubs to Glastonbury. This debut suggests they have further to go.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl