After what may have seemed like an endless three-month wait, the album appeared and confirmed that the combo of Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss (along with additional touring member Katie Harkin) were still a musical force to be reckoned with.

Tuesday night, D.C. got its turn to celebrate the band’s resurrection with the first of two sold-out shows at the 9:30 Club.

From the opening guitar line of “Price Tag,” the capacity crowd probably knew it was in for something special. The band played nearly nonstop for an hour and a half. The 23-song setlist drew heavily from the new album, covering eight of its 10 tracks, but touched on older favorites like “Start Together,” “Dig Me Out” and “Little Babies.”

The band chanted “We’re not here ’cause we want to entertain” (“Entertain”), it was clear from the audience’s raucous response that the fourpiece had done just that.

Minneapolis hip-hop artist Lizzo opened the show, and her energetic performance — backed by DJ Sophia Eris and drummer Ryan McMahon — warmed the crowd to a slow simmer.

Missed the show? You can stream the whole thing at NPR.org.

Sleater-Kinney

Lizzo

Corin Tucker On Finding Her Singing Voice

“I wanted to sing, and I think that I wanted to be in a band, but there just wasn’t really the opportunity until I got to Olympia. Right after I got there, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile played their first show and I was like, ‘That’s it, that’s what I’m going to do!’ I started my first band, Heavens to Betsy, and I had kind of more of a sing-song voice when I first started that band. But because it was the ’90s and grunge was ruling the world, I started experimenting with really loud guitar and much more aggressive vocals — just trying to get people’s attention with the music. So yeah, there’s a lot of howling on those early records.”

Carrie Brownstein On Having Famous Fans

“Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance is a huge fan of our band, and I think he’s awesome. I think he’s a good songwriter and singer, and I like his relationship to his fans. He covered ‘I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,’ which is one of our early songs. And Perfume Genius, which is an artist who I love and whose record is one of my favorites of [2014], said he’d seen Sleater-Kinney 13 times. You kind of just never know. People find different ways into this band and different reasons to appreciate it.”

Janet Weiss On The Thrill Of Playing Live

“As a drummer, I think it’s the best place to be heard. A practice space is just brutal for the people who have to listen to the drummer. The studio can be very difficult — with headphones, and you’re sort of trying to make things sound a certain way and it’s very challenging. But live, where there is air and there is energy from the crowd, I think that energy can elevate what I do to a new level. I’m sort of recreating that in my mind, I think, when I play on a record or when I play at practice. In the right situation on stage, I feel more like a superhero than any other time in my life.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Sleater-Kinney didn’t announce any reason for a hiatus that began in 2006, and did nothing to stoke the fires of reunion-mongering in the years since. One member of the group — writer, actor and former NPR Music blogger Carrie Brownstein — touched on the importance of getting a band back together for the right reasons in 2008, saying that Sleater-Kinney would release new music only when she, singer-guitarist Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss “felt like there was more of a story to tell … with each other.” All three have experienced tremendous productivity and success in the past eight years: Brownstein formed a new band, Wild Flag, and created the popular IFC series Portlandia; Tucker started the Corin Tucker Band and released and toured two albums; Weiss drummed for The Shins, Quasi, Wild Flag and Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks. The logistics alone of telling new stories as Sleater-Kinney seemed improbable.

And yet the band’s eighth album, No Cities To Love, is finally here. It sounds as fresh and vital as a debut, but also as nuanced and skillful as the work of three players with a decade-long, inimitable report betwixt them. This album is a story no one but Sleater-Kinney could have told, and now is precisely the right time to tell it. Tucker’s voice is one we need to hear from female musicians­ — confrontational, attention-demanding, feminist and strong as hell. Brownstein, who also contributes powerful vocals, plays so energetically and with such a palpable sense of fun, it’s easy to miss that she’s one of the most skillful rock guitarists working today. Weiss, too, is a technical giant, giving Sleater-Kinney its punk backbone and the stability to experiment with harder rock or breezier pop, angled over the years and over the course of No Cities To Love. The classic-rock slant to 2005’s The Woods is less prevalent here — though the first seven seconds of “Fade” nod to Guns ‘N Roses — but the accessible, pop-adjacent punk of 2000’s All Hands On The Bad One is audible, particularly in the chorus-centric title track.

Ten years and eight albums in, Sleater-Kinney still experiments with and expands its instantly recognizable sound profile with irresistible results. Higher production values, paired with musicians at the top of their game, have added shine to the group’s Pacific Northwest-rooted, riot grrrl-influenced rock without changing its irrepressible heart.

If No Cities To Love is typecast as a reunion record, it might lose its poignancy as a portrait of a beloved band growing fully into itself. Yes, the world needed a new Sleater-Kinney record. “Bury Our Friends,” with its grownup vulnerabilities, and “Price Tag,” with its post-recession anxiety, couldn’t have been made any time but now, and exhibit new depths of thematic maturity. But, more than anything else, Sleater-Kinney needed a new Sleater-Kinney record, and its members chose each other all over again to make it. What truer, simpler reunion mythos is there?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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/.

It’s been eight years since Sleater-Kinney went on hiatus, almost 10 since the trio put out its last album, The Woods, in 2005. Singer and guitarist (and occasional NPR Music contributor) Carrie Brownstein tells us via email that the time felt right for the band to reunite, and that they took a more deliberate approach to working on the new record:

“I feel like creativity is about where you want your blood to flow. Because in order to do something meaningful and powerful there has to be life inside of it. Maybe after The Woods that blood had thinned; we felt enervated, the focus had become disparate and diffuse. We drifted apart in order to concentrate on other elements of our lives and careers. Sleater-Kinney isn’t something you can do half-assed or half-heartedly. We have to really want it. And you have to feed that hunger and have the energy to. I’m not saying we need to be in a dark place to be in Sleater-Kinney. In fact, we could be in the best places in our lives. But we have to be willing to push, because the entity that is this band will push right back.

“We had no desire to revisit sounds and styles and paths we had treaded before. But in order to move forward, Corin and I worked together in a way that was more reminiscent of earlier albums like Dig Me Out. Meaning that we would write just the two of us and then bring songs to Janet later on in the process. I think we had to go back to an earlier model of writing in order to reacquaint ourselves with the language of the band. It’s a sonic vernacular that isn’t easily translated into other contexts in which we’ve played. This was a very deliberate writing process, there were many edits and iterations of the songs. We thought a lot about melody and structure.

“I spent a lot of time writing choruses for this record. Melody is what I was most picky about. I really drove Corin crazy sometimes. We would have choruses that we would work on for hours, days, maybe on and off over a matter of weeks. And we’d think we had solved it, but then I would listen to it later on and decide to discard it, that it wasn’t good enough. I did that with my guitar parts too. In the end we were all more scrutinizing with our own parts than we ever have been. I think we didn’t want to take any second of the song for granted, everything had to have an intention and earn its place.”

Brownstein and Tucker first formed Sleater-Kinney in 1994, and drummer Janet Weiss joined the band two years later. After releasing seven full-length studio albums, the band went on indefinite hiatus in 2006.

In 2007 Brownstein created and wrote for the NPR Music blog Monitor Mix. In 2010 Brownstein ended the blog and began work on the Portlandia television show. She also formed the band Wild Flag with Weiss and guitarist Mary Timony (Helium, Ex Hex), while Corin Tucker released a solo album as The Corin Tucker Band.

“Bury Our Friends” first started showing up on the Internet on Friday, after the song was included as a surprise in a vinyl box set of Sleater-Kinney’s complete discography. You can pre-order No Cities to Love here and download a copy of “Bury Our Friends” at this link. The cover for the album and track list are below, along with tour dates for February and March. Yeah, we’re excited.

No Cities To Love Track List:

1. Price Tag
2. Fangless
3. Surface Envy
4. No Cities To Love
5. A New Wave
6. No Anthems
7. Gimme Love
8. Bury Our Friends
9. Hey Darling
10. Fade

2015 Tour Dates:

02-08-15 Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory
02-09-15 Boise, ID @ Knitting Factory
02-10-15 Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot
02-12-15 Denver, CO @ Ogden Theater
02-13-15 Omaha, NE @ Slowdown
02-14-15 Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
02-15-15 Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall
02-17-15 Chicago, IL @ Riviera
02-22-15 Boston, MA @ House of Blues
02-24-15 Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
02-26-15 New York, NY @ Terminal 5
02-28-15 Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
03-01-15 Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE
03-18-15 Berlin, Germany @ Postbahnhof
03-19-15 Amsterdam, The Netherlands @ Paradiso
03-20-15 Paris, France @ Cigale
03-21-15 Antwerp, Belgium @ Trix
03-23-15 London, UK @ Roundhouse
03-24-15 Manchester, UK @ Albert Hall
03-25-15 Glasgow, UK @ O2 ABC
03-26-15 Dublin, Ireland @ Vicar Street

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