Sleater-Kinney - Surface Envy

Music 4 years ago

Sleater-Kinney - Surface Envy

Sleater-Kinney returned with a song about exhuming your idols, and their comeback album hit like a fist through a grave.

The reformed Portland trio were hungry, and they knew that we had been starved of a successor.

Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss rekindled their unique language and taunted us with it, crafting jut-jawed cadences that were often impossible to sing along to. .

They tainted their eighth record's wall-to-wall firebrand choruses with their signature drop-tuning, which hardened their agitated declarations against softening to easy slogans.

It couldn't have been anyone else, but it didn't sound like anything they had made before. Even now, 11 months after its release, it still sounds jarring, corroded and full of fight.