Sleater-Kinney Lost Its Chaos Before It Lost Its Drummer

There’s a clear case to be made that the best way to hear music is, simply, to listen. Discard expectations; consume the sound coming from the speaker; note how you feel. The end. Another way is to place it in its context: Learn about its creators, its genre, its lineage, what it’s attempting, what it’s implying. The divide between those two ways of hearing may seem stark—after all, isn’t it purest to , , forget , and so on?Sleater-Kinney’s new album shows the inevitability, and the helpfulness, of relating what’s outside the music to what’s inside it.