In 2019, Janet Weiss suggested that she had been shut out of decision-making processes in the band and that was why she left. I’m curious how you feel about that characterization.

CB: I mean, anyone who thinks there aren’t multiple perspectives and sides to this is either being willfully ignorant or perhaps lacks their own real-life experience. To be honest, I’m not interested in continuing to talk about something that really seems to revel in female cattiness and conjecture and confirmation bias.

I do think news of the lineup changing cast The Center Won’t Hold in a certain light. You were working with Annie Clark from St. Vincent, and she’d just put out a record with Jack Antonoff, who had just worked with Taylor Swift. Some people thought the band took a sharp left into pop music and kinda came apart.

CT: Personally, I’m always wanting to try different things and to be creative in different ways. That can be hard sometimes. It can be difficult. It can make you uncomfortable. I think that’s part of being an artist and doing work that keeps you interested over a long period of time. And I feel like we learned so much from the last record, from Annie producing and everything we were trying out. We’d never really written with keyboards. We tried a lot of different things. I’m not saying they were all successful, but it was different. We were able to take those new skills and put them to use on this new album.

CB: I find it really interesting that the same people who reject conservatism [in politics] will insist upon a very orthodox view of this band, that people who rail against binary oppositions on all fronts will settle for reductive, fixed, black-and-white narratives of Sleater-Kinney through refusing to acknowledge nuance or multiple truths. Sometimes it seemed like the reaction to The Center Won’t Hold was more about us refusing to conform to a codified and static version of ourselves. Ultimately, the role of the artist, I have always thought, is to experiment and thrash around and make mistakes and just be out. I’m not saying that’s what we did on the last record. If everyone’s aiming for the same bull’s-eye, you end up with conformity, so we’ve always seen our role as being out of step sometimes with what people want.

The only thing I could care less about than the Janet split is Sleater-Kinney in general

New album is out today!

definitely better than the center wont hold

definitely worse than every other thing they've released

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