“WE LIKE HEAVY SOUNDS ON GUITAR!"

Alt-rock trailblazers Sleater-Kinney were making bassless records long before The White Stripes and The Black Keys came along. As co-leader Carrie Brownstein says: “The power comes from the conversation that the two guitars are having with each other…”

Formed amid the '90s riot-grrrl movement, Sleater-Kinney's seminal early records were rage-fuelled and explosive. New effort Little Rope is barely less explosive but primarily fuelled by a different emotion: grief.

Sleater-Kinney were midway through the songwriting process when Carrie Brownstein learned from the American embassy that her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while holidaying in Italy. On this new album, Carrie and fellow guitarist/ vocalist Corin Tucker manifest all the feelings of loss in sounds that range from thundering to delicate. 30 years into their career, Corin's monumental voice is more than equal to the task, and both guitarists wrestle their Gibsons into tones both caustic and vulnerable.

For some, grieving is a process of disappearing into yourself, but for Carrie, Little Rope is exactly the opposite. "We just wanted to make something that felt extroverted, that felt lively, and that felt like it was going to be a container for these big emotions and sounds," she says. "Usually our favourite records are something that's going to bring people in and create an environment where there's restlessness and urgency.

Whether it was guitar tones or tempo, I think everything just had this energy to it." Little Rope carries off the feat of being melodic and aggressive at the same time, thanks to the interplay between Corin and Carrie's guitar tones. "We were just getting tones that were really crunchy to layer underneath prettier tones," Carrie explains. "Two pedals that we really toyed with a lot were the Expandora [fuzz] and the Jangle Box [compressor).

I used a lot of chorus. I like putting a little harmoniser on things, or phase, but I like stacking that over something that is very corrosive.

"It's like at the core of the song is just this vibrational distortion that's kind of breaking apart," she continues.