Exhume Your Idols: The Return of Sleater-Kinney

Of course, few bands stay broken up these days, especially those that don’t go out clawing at each other’s throats. As the years passed, though, the chances of a Sleater-Kinney reboot seemed less and less likely. Everyone had other things taking up their time. Brownstein had Portlandia. Tucker had another child, a daughter named Glory, with her husband, filmmaker Lance Bangs, and a creative outlet in the relatively mellowed-out Corin Tucker Band. Along with Wild Flag, Weiss loaned her percussive muscle to Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Bright Eyes and the Shins and continued Quasi, her long-running project with ex-husband Sam Coomes. (She also had responsibilities tied to Portlandia, working as a locations scout.) No one had closed the door on getting back together, and they even hinted at the possibility in interviews, but no one was just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, either.

But for all the preoccupations, and all the ramifications attached to bringing back Sleater-Kinney, it didn’t take much to get the reunion ball rolling.

“It was really an organic conversation,” Tucker says, recalling the night in early 2012 when the subject was first broached. “Carrie and I were at my house, watching a Portlandia episode my son was in. We were just hanging out and catching up and talking about music, and I was like, ‘I wonder if we’ll ever do a Sleater-Kinney show again.’ So that started the whole conversation. But it took a year to figure out what we were going to do.”

One thing was immediately clear, though: If a reunion was going to happen, an album had to come first. “For us, playing new songs is always more entertaining than playing old songs,” Weiss says. “We know that about ourselves. If we did a tour just playing old songs we would’ve been like, ‘Oh, we should’ve made a record.’” After some initial jam sessions, Tucker and Brownstein went down to Brownstein’s refurbished basement in Northeast Portland, and spent the next year throwing riffs, lyrics and melodies at each other. “We pored over the arrangements,” Brownstein says. “There would be choruses we’d have for a month that I’d listen to and go, ‘This isn’t good enough. I don’t like my melody here. We have to completely change this chorus.’”

On the one hand, the band resumed its career by immediately thrusting itself into another high-pressure situation, one which, for them, was unprecedented: It had never recorded songs without road-testing them beforehand. But then again, no one knew it was even happening. Without label-enforced deadlines, the band edited and re-edited, polishing the material until it wasn’t just right, but perfect. It had to be.

“You’re trying to get to a place beyond where you’ve been, and you keep pushing yourself,” Weiss says. “We’ve always done that, but with this [album], there was a little bit more of, ‘We can’t get back together unless we’re going to make our best record.’ The only way to do that is not to repeat yourself.”

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A lot has been made of how Sleater-Kinney carried out their reformation “in secret,” but it wasn’t like they were sneaking around, disguised in costumes from Portlandia’s wardrobe department. They were, in truth, pretty laissez-faire about the whole thing, blabbing about it to friends and even journalists who, for whatever reason, kept it to themselves. When Pearl Jam came through Portland in November 2013, all three got up onstage at the Moda Center, joining in on an encore of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ In The Free World,” which, to their alleged surprise, sent the online rumor mill into hyperdrive. (“Ed talked us into getting up there,” Weiss says. “When he charms you into doing something, you’re most likely going to do it.”)

Still, when the band finally emerged from the basement, ready to go into the studio, it happened so swiftly even their collaborators were caught off guard.

“They had gotten in touch with me about mixing some demos they had done, which gave me a raised eyebrow that everyone was together and writing,” says producer John Goodmanson, who helmed every album from Dig Me Outthrough One Beat. “But really, I got the call on a Monday or Tuesday, and I was in San Francisco by Friday. So when it was go time, it was go time.”

For as long as it took to write, No Cities To Lovewas recorded in just about two weeks, necessitated by Brownstein’s schedule, in San Francisco and Seattle and wrapping up in Portland last March. Seven months later, Sub Pop issued Start Together, a remastered vinyl box set of the Sleater-Kinney discography. Included with it was a surprise seven-inch containing an “unreleased song” called “Bury Our Friends,” a mid-tempo stomper based around an utterly Valhallan Brownstein riff, with lyrics suspiciously centered on the exhumation of idols and pushing forward in the face of adversity. A few days of fervent Internet speculation later, it was confirmed as No Cities’first single. It was the ideal reintroduction for a band that’s never been content to stay in one place too long: a song about detaching from one’s past, stashed inside a celebration of their own.