In December, 2011, Carrie Brownstein was sitting on Corin Tucker’s couch, in Portland, Oregon. Once bandmates in an indie-rock group called Sleater-Kinney, which they started in 1994 and named after a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington, Brownstein and Tucker hadn’t played together since 2006. Brownstein had become even better known as a comic actor, on the IFC show “Portlandia,” an affectionate parody of the city where all the members of Sleater-Kinney now live. Janet Weiss, the drummer, had been playing in groups like Quasi, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, and Wild Flag, which also included Brownstein. Tucker had been raising her children and releasing solo records. But on that day in 2011 Tucker turned to Brownstein and said, “I wonder if we’re ever gonna play again.”

For some people, this is a bit like John calling Paul in 1975 and asking, “Hey, should we do some shows?” In the nineties and the early aughts, the respect and passion that Sleater-Kinney generated was equalled by only a few bands. The group’s appeal went beyond the ordinary magic of making two guitars, drums, and voices sound like a setup that you’d never heard before; in 2001, Greil Marcus called Sleater-Kinney the greatest rock band in America.

Sleater-Kinney was certainly not the first independent band to create such a devoted following, nor was it the first all-female band to make its mark in the boys’ club of indie rock. But it was solid proof that the idealistic indie-rock community could sustain itself while living out its own beliefs. Even if you had subscribed to all the earnest discussion about gender parity and musicians operating with complete financial and aesthetic independence which came with much of the talk around small-batch rock in the eighties, you were likely still aware of the cold possibility that the meatheads would win and nothing would change.

Sleater-Kinney was part of a new world of zines and bands—riot grrrl and Bikini Kill being the best known—that were committed to promoting independent rock for and by women. A number of bands started by and consisting mostly of women, based in hubs such as Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Washington, had been making music since the early nineties, including Bratmobile, Autoclave, Heavens to Betsy—Tucker’s group before Sleater-Kinney—and Brownstein’s Excuse 17. Though there were very few bad records released by these bands, many of them seemed intermittently thin, a common side effect of being autodidacts. But Sleater-Kinney had both weight and grace; the act didn’t sound like a self-taught upstart, even if it was.

Sleater-Kinney’s career has followed a sort of template for the indie-rock-band trajectory: its first album was on a tiny independent label, followed by releases on larger ones with equally impeccable credentials, Kill Rock Stars and Sub Pop. The band members are as distinct as those in any canonical classic rock band, where each member is sufficiently individuated as to be one step away from being an action figure. Brownstein, who shares guitar and vocal duties with Tucker, is the lightest of heart, fond of reclaiming rock moves like high kicks and windmilling arms. Weiss, the drummer, supplies the band’s elegance and power. Her playing never wanders into textural fills; instead, it drives, continually underscoring the momentum of the song. Tucker’s voice cuts through anything that the band puts forth. Some of her prowess is technical—she favors the top end of her very loud alto, which often shimmers like a struck bell—but her voice also presents itself as simply bigger, as if her entire body had gone into the act of pushing out the words.

“I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” from the band’s second album, “Call the Doctor” (1996), established some of the band members’ politics and their sound, though it did not represent all of their range. The song moves ahead swiftly, as Brownstein and Tucker outline it with fragmentary guitar figures and barre chords. The two trade singing roles, addressing someone who sounds more like an audience member than like some potential partner: “I wanna be your Joey Ramone,” Tucker sings, and then exchanges “yeah”s with Brownstein. Tucker finishes by putting herself, and her band, in teen-idol territory, with “pictures of me on your bedroom door.” The bridge makes it fairly clear that this isn’t a love song, even when it sounds like one. Tucker is taking on an idea of community in rock: “Are you that scared? I swear they’re looking right at me. Push to the front so I can see.” It sounded like an anthem that had been waiting to be written.

Going to Sleater-Kinney shows felt vaguely uncomfortable, but not because there was an atmosphere of girls having declared war on boys—boys were irrelevant. What was simultaneously thrilling and discomfiting was the intensity of enthusiasm that Sleater-Kinney fans had. I remember one show at Irving Plaza, in the early aughts, that seemed like a floor convention, with each completed song cheered as if it were a delegate won over.

The skeptic may be suspicious when I say that, after “All Hands on the Bad One” (2000), the new album, “No Cities to Love,” is my favorite Sleater-Kinney record, but it is: the musicians pull it off. The songwriters’ ability to create general but urgent scenarios is both more substantial and more insistent than before.

The album has a tendency to splinter and change and re-form, unlike the band’s previous studio album, “The Woods” (2005), which roared, occasionally surging and falling back on itself. The title track of “No Cities to Love” sounds like an older Sleater-Kinney song that has been disassembled, laid out on a blanket, and then reassembled, after extensive polishing. Few bands can make their guitars sound so different from moment to moment without the use of effects. The guitar tones change from section to section: fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading. Tucker conveys something I’ve never heard in another singer—the ability to suggest both that she has escaped from pain and that she is still possessed by something. Almost against their own history, she and Brownstein sing together, in the chorus of another song, “There are no anthems.” As in many Sleater-Kinney songs, which typically avoid storytelling, there seems to be a problem being solved, and here it is, evidently, the spectre of exceptionalism, of being that band that’s really great—for a bunch of girls.

That patronizing frame surrounds much praise of the band, especially when men are writing. But ignoring the band members’ gender in the name of fair treatment overlooks the conditions that made them agitate for fair treatment in the first place. Thinking that the excellence of any act, even Sleater-Kinney, is somehow post-gender requires a leap of imagination, as if the world were not still short on gender utopias. As great as Sleater-Kinney is, the band has not brought that about. ♦