All three members of the group have put out music over the last decade (and stayed friends — they really do watch episodes of Portlandia in each others’ basements), but there’s something special about the combination of these three women on stage or in the studio. We’ve got plenty of proof of that here. When they joined All Songs Considered hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton to listen to songs from the new record and talk about how it was made, the topic of chemistry came up again and again. “Part of this whole Sleater-Kinney 2.0 is breaking the rules,” Corin Tucker says. “We wanted to tell our story … we feel like we need to stand up for ourselves.”

Quotes from that conversation are below. You can hear the entire thing, along with clips from three songs from No Cities To Love, at the audio link on this page (Audio will be available shortly).

On deciding to get back together:

BOB BOILEN: I’m just wondering: who called who?

CORIN TUCKER: Actually, Carrie was at my house. We were hanging out, and I think we were watching Portlandia episodes that they were working on. And Fred [Armisen] was there, too. We were talking about playing music … and I said, …’I wonder if we’re ever gonna do a Sleater-Kinney show again.’

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: I think we had two people in the room who are known fans of the band. One is Corin’s husband, Lance Bangs, and the other is Fred Armisen, who was a fan of the band long before he and I worked together… they were very encouraging, and I think just wouldn’t let that conversation die…It was something that began percolating then. We talked to Janet and, you know, the conversation started.

On the early stages of the songwriting process:

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: We wrote in my basement. It took on many permutations, and eventually we settled on a process that was a little more akin to what we had done in the early years, partially because Corin and I had to kind of reacquaint ourselves to the very specific vernacular that she and I speak, musically. And so, [she] and I would work on songs and then bring them to Janet, instead of jamming … It’s almost telepathic. I think that Corin and I can complete each other’s musical sentences in a way that never ceases to surprise me.

On the lyrics to the album’s first single, “Bury Our Friends”:

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: There’s the line, “Only I get to be sickened by me,” or “Only I get to be punished by me.” A lot of this song was… trying to posit yourself — your body or your mind — into a space that is… assured, and safe, and sort of rejecting criticism and…having to figure out how to make sense of potential insignificance or irrelevance. It’s just a lot about reclamation, I think.

ROBIN HILTON: A song you think you could have written fifteen years ago, or twenty years ago, when the band was starting out? Or one that could only happen now?

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: Both, I think. I mean, lyrically, I feel like sometimes I’ve been writing the same song since I wrote the song ‘You Annoy Me’ when I was 16. But I think more in the second verse, I’m singing about seeking out fragments of stillness, and trying to make sense of power and struggle — not just as this propulsion where you’re pushing against something, which is less combative and more about a solidity, like an inner kind of wholeness, that I think… I would not have sang about when I was 19.

On aging and its effect on the band’s sound:

BOB BOILEN: I mean, a lot of the drive in the music comes off as aggression, comes out as frustration. So much of rock music has to do with… this pent up energy , this pent up emotion — like, pissed at the world, pissed at the way people treat you — all that stuff. And that happens when you’re younger, and that comes out as the force of guitars and drums. What is the driving force? How does the message connect to the energy of the song?

JANET WEISS: I feel like, with the three of us, with the way we connect, there’s a desperation to reach a certain level…a desperation to break through of the mundane, of the generic. We’re trying to push through, so desperately, to something bigger, that it just sort of comes out in this really powerful, forward-moving way. But I don’t think that’s changed. I think…we just…don’t write a lot of slow songs –there’s a lot of…unbridled energy….I guess as far as young versus old, I don’t really feel like I’ve said it all, and I’m comfortable, and I’m sort of ready to kick my feet up. I feel like there’s a lot left to do… and if we’re gonna do this, the three of us, let’s make it off the charts.

On listening to Sleater-Kinney’s older albums before releasing the box set, Start Together:

CORIN TUCKER: There’s definitely a couple grimaces on the first record, like ‘what?’ But also, just a feeling of compassion for the journey that we took. We started the band so young, and everything that we wrote about, all the different parts of our lives, and all the different characters that we drew, I think they’re really kind of special, and they obviously touched people really deeply.

On being women in the music industry:

ROBIN HILTON: Politics have changed over the last twenty years. You wrote so much about how hard it was to be a woman, making this kind of music in particular, being in such a male-dominated field…I’m wondering if you feel like much has changed since then. If it’s gotten any better.

CORIN TUCKER: I think it has gotten better. Our society has become more progressive in talking about women’s issues and safety and I think Obama just really stepped up recently and spoke about talking to survivors of sexual assault, and saying, you know, we’ve got your back. We need to do something about this. I mean, that’s a really big deal. That’s something no president has ever done, and, you know, for someone that’s in charge of our country to say, “This is important and we need to work on this, and keep working together,” that’s a huge step forward.

ROBIN HILTON: I think, this year, I think the best rock records of this year are from women. I think of the St. Vincent record, or the Angel Olsen record. I feel like it’s an area that [women] own this year.

JANET WEISS: I still think if you looked at the headliners of festivals, though — the people that play after dark, I like to say — it’s hard to be a woman. You will see it’s very male-dominated, still. I mean, there’s just still not a lot of women in those top slots, even though they have earned it completely. It’s not like things are really that different, even though some of the best work is being made by women.

On feeling like an outsider:

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: I think in all of the creative pursuits I have, I feel like it’s an exploration of otherness and feeling like an outsider and creating work that’s strange and unusual that goes along the periphery for people to find if they need it. I think that’s how I go through life — kind of in an outside lane, sort of observing. Observing what’s happening in the center. And, so, I think a lot of these songs have to do with an inchoate, almost shapelessness. And I think that’s why a lot of the titles have words like “surface,” and “cities,” these things that are logistically, technically concrete, but actually are so much more murky in reality. And trying to make sense of what that stability is, and what it means to feel other when there’s so much in the middle that it keeps you not just on the outside, but wanting to be on the outside.

On whether the band has evolved and been influenced by other music:

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: Well, I really think Sleater-Kinney is a singular band with no clear predecessor or successor, so I don’t think we started out creating music that you could see the palette of colors that we were using, and maybe draw a lineage. But certainly there wasn’t a distinct band that we were pulling from, and I think subsequently, there haven’t been bands that sounds like us. So I don’t really know how we would’ve come back together and done anything other than be ourselves.

I do think that I like pop music, and I think a lot about melody — but that doesn’t even mean Top 40 music, necessarily, it’s just, in the years of listening to music, and what I’ve decided to discard, and literally throw out, it tends to be music that just doesn’t have good songwriting, or good melody. Like, that’s just what I come back to over and over again: a great chorus, or a great hook. It doesn’t have to be saccharine, it doesn’t have to be cheap. I think that, to me, has a forcefulness to it, and I do think that this record focuses on choruses in a way that some of our earlier records didn’t. Although I can hear it come in on an album like All Hands on the Bad One, I can hear the poppier elements start to come out on that record. There’s just such a singular aspect to this band. We’re not porous, we’re not letting a lot of outside things in. And when we do, the way that it’s interpreted within the three of us, what comes out doesn’t sound anything like what we brought in.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Once Jenny Toomey opened the door to MTV, her days at Positive Force’s headquarters were numbered.

Toomey and Kristin Thomson ran the independent record label Simple Machines out of the punk-rock house in Arlington, Virginia, in the early 1990s. The label shared space with Mark Andersen, the co-founder of activist group Positive Force and several other lefty activists involved in the collective. Inside the house’s walls, meat, alcohol, drugs and corporate rock were strictly prohibited.

Robin Bell has spent five years working on “Positive Force: More Than A Witness.”

But the cable TV network had caught on to Simple Machines, and in 1992 the label owners invited an MTV crew to film at the residence. What happened next is already recounted in Andersen and Mark Jenkins’ book about the history of D.C.’s punk scene, Dance Of Days, but the story is revived in Robin Bell’s engrossing new documentary, Positive Force: More Than A Witness, which gets a preview at Mount Pleasant Library Thursday night and formally premieres Nov. 14-15 at St. Stephen’s Church.

“All of a sudden, I come home to discover MTV’s in my house,” Andersen says in the film. He tells the tale with a faint smile, but at the time, it was a death blow. According to Dance of Days, he and Toomey stopped speaking almost entirely after the incident. “There was something about what we were doing that I think felt too commercial to Mark,” Toomey says in the film. She and Thomson soon moved out and started their own spot, the Simple Machines House.

Similar ideological clashes pock the story of Positive Force, the activist collective that has put on more than 500 benefit concerts for local organizations in its 29 years. Another rift came in 2005, when a faction of Positive Force volunteers arranged a march down Columbia Road NW that resulted in violence and more than 70 arrests. Some people in that group later split from Positive Force and redirected their attention toward the expressly anarchist Brian MacKenzie Infoshop in Shaw. For some, Positive Force seemed too traditional. For others, like Toomey, it seemed too uncompromising. But it still exists to this day—a testament not only to Andersen’s dedication, but also its mission’s ongoing relevance to volunteers and local musicians.

Positive Force’s operating procedure could be another reason it’s stuck around this long: In the film, Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna seems a little surprised by the hoops she had to jump through to host a riot grrrl meeting at the Positive Force house, which shut its doors in 2000.

“We had to go to a Positive Force meeting first,” Hanna says. “I’d never had a pitch meeting before. But I was doing a pitch meeting for why they should let us use their house for this all-women’s radical feminist community organizing meeting.” The house’s residents eventually gave her the green light—a decision that made Positive Force one of the earliest advocates of what would become a global feminist movement.

Kathleen Hanna – DC Punk Scene from Bell Visuals on Vimeo.

Bell, a 37-year-old filmmaker who has taught at the Corcoran, calls himself a Positive Force ally. He developed a relationship with the organization while putting in hours at the Washington Independent Media Center, which shared the Arthur S. Flemming Center in Shaw with the Infoshop, Positive Force and other nonprofit groups starting in 2003. Encouraged by Positive Force members and Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, Bell began assembling Positive Force: More Than A Witness in 2009. Two years later he ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that grossed more than $16,000, and he kicked in money from a hefty settlement he won after successfully suing the D.C. government for his arrest during a 2002 protest.

To produce the film as affordably as possible, Bell turned his Mount Pleasant bedroom into a studio and conducted most of his interviews there. With Andersen’s help, he recruited an impressive array of musicians who had played Positive Force shows in the past, including Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe, Chumbawumba’s Danbert Nobacon, Anti-Flag’s Justin Sane and Trophy Wife’s Katy Otto. Bell traveled to interview indie rocker Ted Leo, Kathleen Hanna, Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace and notably Crass founding member Penny Rimbaud, whom Bell filmed at Dial House, the artist’s famous rural commune in Essex, England. (Rimbaud whipped up an amazing pasta dish, Bell says.)

To channel the grimy intensity of a typical Positive Force show in the 1980s and ’90s, Bell included remarkable concert footage (much of which he helped funnel toward the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s HBO series, Sonic Highways). Among that footage, some of which is online: visceral scenes from Bikini Kill and Fugazi protest concerts downtown and a particularly raucous Nation of Ulysses gig at Columbia Heights’ Sacred Heart Church in 1991. In the latter, singer Ian Svenonius is seen tossing himself like a flour sack into an undulating crowd—whose ticket money that night benefited the victims of the Latin American debt crisis.

To Bell, part of the point of making Positive Force: More Than A Witness was to show people from all over the world how music and activism can intersect, and in this case, under the banner of Positive Force. He describes the collective’s ethos as, “Let’s not just talk about the problem; we’re actually going to try to find a creative solution to it.”

But in today’s D.C. scene, we don’t see many of the charged, angsty punk protests that Bell spotlights in his documentary. Andersen now spends most of his time working with local organization We Are Family, a group that provides food, services and companionship to D.C. senior citizens. Meanwhile, Positive Force benefit shows seem fewer and farther between.

Is Positive Force winding down? “I don’t think it’s over,” Bell says. “I think it’s just changed.” Protest movements ebb and flow, he says, and young idealistic people—the folks Positive Force has traditionally appealed to—face an ever-climbing cost of living in D.C. and its suburbs. “Now, with just how expensive it is to live in the city, pretty much everyone who’s young is under the gun,” Bell says.

Andersen says Positive Force’s benefit shows can happen as often as local bands want them to. “The musicians who played for us… we couldn’t work nearly as effectively without them,” he says. Fugazi—who only played free shows, protests and benefits in D.C., many of them connected to Positive Force—was the group’s greatest gift. But Fugazi last performed in 2002. Other local bands have stepped up to play Positive Force gigs, but it’s hard to match the draw Fugazi had in its peak years.

Nevertheless, Andersen says Positive Force is less about self-preservation than its ideas.

“If the vehicle wears out, then you find another one,” he says in the documentary. “The energy, the idea, the attitude, the spirit is what counts. I think the spirit’s still there… whether Positive Force is there or not.”

Mark Andersen is scheduled to appear on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show Thursday at noon. Robin Bell discusses Positive Force: More Than A Witness Thursday evening at Mount Pleasant Library. The film premieres Nov. 14 and 15 at St. Stephen’s Church.

Due to a reporting error, the original version of this article misidentified Penny Rimbaud as the singer of Crass. He co-founded and contributed vocals to the legendary punk band, but Rimbaud mostly played drums in the group. The article has been corrected.