We meet Sleater-Kinney as a trio and leave them as a duo. With their inner workings altered, but their most progressive work at their fingertips, we find a band stepping into an unexpected new dawn.

“Right before we went in to record [‘The Center Won’t Hold], Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed,” she continues, referring to Trump’s pick for the American Supreme Court. Neither the fact that he faced three separate allegations of sexual abuse, nor the brave testimony from Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who spoke publically about being assaulted, could stop Kavanaugh’s nomination being approved. Like the US President, who also faces multiple sexual abuse allegations, he has now been admitted to a position of immense political power. “It was such a knife in the heart, “ Corin continues. “Of course it makes you feel so raw. Thank god we have this band to put those feelings somewhere.”

“There have been moments of total despair,” starts Corin Tucker, taking stock of the last few years, gathered together in London with bandmates Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein.

A record on the run from chaos, ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ hungers after forming a meaningful connection in this modern void, and often gets nowhere. Ferocious lead single ‘Hurry On Home’ makes itself malleable, offering itself up as a “hair grabbable, grand-slammable” booty call secretly longing for escape: “disconnect me from my bones / So I can float, so I can roam” it pleads. If the beast hunched at the centre of the group’s previous record ‘No Cities To Love’ ached with anger and fury, this new iteration is lonely, adrift, and after something far less rebellious than anarchy or revolution. Instead, it craves warmth.

In the run-up to Donald Trump’s eventual election in the United States in 2016, certain lines from this poem were quoted more times within seven months than the previous thirty years combined. “The centre cannot hold” has become shorthand for the dangerous, hateful and fractured political climate of the present; switch “cannot” to a slightly more hopeful “won’t” and it’s also a phrase that titles Sleater-Kinney ’s ninth album.

As far as apocalyptic images go, the sight of an abandoned falcon circling frantically around a crumbling planet earth must rank fairly high-up on the end-of-the-world scale. It’s the dystopian image that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats famously painted in his 1919 text ‘The Second Coming’, written following the devastation of World War I. Perhaps strangely, the poem has been enjoying a resurgence of late. Artists have been rightfully pilfering Yeats’ words ever since he wrote them, but in recent years these same lines have been widely quoted, like choice lyrics from a number one pop smash - often as a way of making sense of how absurdly cruel the world has become.

“Ever since you’re a little girl you learn: be polite, don’t speak out, be docile, be pretty, all of that stuff,” observes Janet. “Our band has been grappling with those societal norms since the beginning. Be loud, be brash, be angry, and all these things that are frowned upon. Be powerful,” she urges.

“It’s about thinking about the body as a place of resistance, too,” agrees Carrie. “How much a body can withstand; trauma, trespass. Most of the narrators on ‘The Center Won’t Hold’,” she says, “are on the precipice of not being able to carry that burden anymore.”

Since Sleater-Kinney formed in Olympia, WA back in 1994, bodies have been a primary focus of the band. “Dig me out, dig me in / Out of my body, out of my skin,” rallies Corin on the title track of 1997’s ‘Dig Me Out’, with gripping urgency. It’s the perfect mantra for the band - one of raging against a feeling of smallness, of being held back. And from the despairing figure of ‘Broken’, which reflects on the pain of weathering the #MeToo movement as a woman, to ‘Reach Out’’s grapple for connection, ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ makes a point of taking up as much space as possible, wielding huge choruses and grinding unease as weapon of choice.

“Right before we went in to record [‘The Center Won’t Hold], Brett Kavanagh was being confirmed. It was such a knife in the heart. Thank god we have this band to put those feelings somewhere.”

“I yelped more for St. Vincent than I’ve ever yelped in my life.” — Corin Tucker

On ‘The Center Won’t Hold’, a substantial portion of that weighty, guttural power comes from its swamp of squelching, low register synths: a possibility that was fully unlocked by the record’s producer, St Vincent. A long-standing friend of the band (Annie Clark previously made a guest cameo in Carrie’s comedy show Portlandia, and the pair are now collaborating on a mockumentary starring “heightened versions of themselves”), they originally demoed with “St Vince” on a trial basis. “She knocked it out of the park so hard,” enthuses Corin. In their first studio session alone, the band nailed ’The Center Won’t Hold’, ‘Ruins’ and ‘The Dog / The Body’.

“She’s very prepared,” Janet says. “Very present.” “St Vincent really has a dark sense of humour, and an almost Dadaist approach to adding a sense of absurdism,” picks up Carrie. “I think she did that a couple of times purposefully in the record with us, on songs that are as dark as anything. Like, in ‘Can I Go On’, you,” she laughs, indicating Corin, “just suddenly say ‘it’s sticky!’ in the middle of a song.” “I yelped more for that lady than I’ve ever yelped in my life,” Corin laughs. “Like a psychotic porpoise,” agrees Carrie. “Metaphorically we started thinking about the ways that the tools that we have - in terms of governments and societies - aren’t as effective anymore,” she goes on, expanding on the shifting palette of ‘The Center Won’t Hold’. “Usually we get to a guttural place with vocals, but this was like, how can we get down to the most base level of human emotion? Really scraping at the bottom of something: of a soul, of a being, of a society. You start getting drawn to the lower end in that way. “One thing I like about this record is that often the narrator is singing from a line of solitude,” she concludes. “There’s a path of solitude on the verse, they’re singing alone. They’re speaking to despondency, or an isolation - and then in the chorus, that’s often met by multiple voices.” Likewise, ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ was created from a similar position of separation and then unity. For the first time, the band ditched their usual writing approach in favour of slinging ideas between Los Angeles and Portland. Instead of hashing things out together in the same room, the separate members of Sleater-Kinney downloaded each other’s partly-formed sketches while based a thousand miles apart. Centrepiece ‘Love’ is something of a dedication to the magic of their band: in Carrie’s words, “it’s a reminder that the music we share truly connects us; a meta song in the middle of an album that had been written that way.”

“It’s about taking the work of not just three strong women in this band, but a fourth strong woman in St. Vincent, and combining those forces. I hope that when people listen to this record, that’s what they’re thinking about.” — Carrie Brownstein

Just a couple of weeks after our first meeting, however, and the reality of that connection is an altogether different one. Sleater-Kinney are back in the US and, rather than rehearsing for their upcoming album tour, they’re instead unexpectedly turning and turning in the widening gyre. It came as a shock to Corin and Carrie when Janet - out of the blue, to their knowledge anyway - decided that she wanted out from the band. The group held several crisis talks behind the scenes. “We really tried to talk her into staying,” says Corin, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles. “We just weren’t successful.” In a statement released at the beginning of July, Janet confirmed that she was leaving Sleater-Kinney after 24 years, in a short note simply signed off: ‘The Drummer’. The band was “heading in a new direction,” she wrote, and it was time for her to move on. Did she ever elaborate on what she meant by that, privately? “Not really,” replies Carrie. “By every metric, Janet was very enthusiastic about the recording, and the outcome of everything we’d been working on,” she continues. “We’d all weighed in on all of the decisions, and had a lot of shared enthusiasm. She let us know that she was ready to move on, and we asked her to stay. We really wanted her to do all the rest of the work with us. She’s so amazing on this record; it’s some of her best drumming. We were really excited to bring that into the world with the live shows, but… she was not up for that.” “We had ALL been part of the changes in the band,” Carrie adds. “Janet suggested Annie [Clark] produce the record.” Learning that the new direction of ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ was a major factor in Janet’s departure, she admits, “was a surprise”. “It just felt like at the live shows everything was going to come together,” she trails off. “So… um, yeah. Not sure.” “The amount of raving about the mixes of the songs, the whole endeavour, has been shared by the three of us,” Corin says, “it definitely felt like a surprise to us.” “This was a very joyful recording process,” adds Carrie. “We ALL,” she adds, emphasising, “talked about that in the other part of the interview.” And it’s true that, just last month, Janet seemed enthusiastic about the record. If the drummer was having any doubts, she certainly didn’t let on. “It’s really different, and arresting,” she previously enthused about lead single ‘Hurry On Home’. “It just grabs you. The idea of contrast in music - dark lyrics contrasting with a playful sound - there’s a depth to it which is fun to play with. You’re asking this existential, serious question with everyone singing along. It adds a complexity that I find interesting.”

“We really tried to talk her into staying, we just weren’t successful.” — Corin Tucker