Sleater-Kinney - The Centre Won't Hold review | Ben Beaumont-Thomas's album of the week

The Guardian 80

(Mom + Pop)
Drummer Janet Weiss has left the band since recording this St Vincent-produced album – but their songwriting suggests they can weather anything

In WB Yeats’ most famous line, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”. Things were pretty bad when he wrote that in 1919, the first world war segueing smoothly into the Irish war of independence, but Sleater-Kinney twist the line into something even worse. The centre “won’t” hold – it could, but it won’t. Order might theoretically reign, but we’d prefer to reject it and watch the world burn.

This, then, is an album full of friction: between bodies, generations and, it turns out, the band themselves. The Pacific Northwest trio went on hiatus for a decade after what many consider their masterpiece, The Woods, in 2005; co-frontwoman Carrie Brownstein became hipster-famous in the interim for her sketch comedy show Portlandia. They returned to huge acclaim with No Cities to Love in 2015, and for this follow-up, enlisted Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, as producer. But before its release, drummer Janet Weiss quit after 22 years, saying “the band is moving in a new direction and it is time for me to move on”.

Related: Sleater-Kinney: ‘Music has always been the playground of men’s sexuality’