Tracks 6. 7 and 8 from Dig Me Out (1997)

Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from The Hot Rock (1999)

Tracks 24 and 25 from Path To Wellness (2021)

Sleater-Kinney was always a band that I felt like other people loved a lot more than me, but my brother had their albums and the band has grown on me a lot over their years. I particularly like the albums with Janet Weiss, and how she sort of grounds the trebly interplay between the guitars. As much as I love the bass guitar, I'm a little fascinated with that period in '90s indie rock when bands with two guitars and no bass were a little more common (see also: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts). I've had a couple bands that played shows with two guitars and no bass, some people don't like that configuration but I dig it. 

It always feels a little silly doing a 'deep cuts' playlist for a band that's really respected as an album act, so I tried to avoid some of the songs that really felt like 'hits' even if they weren't singles or music videos. I made a playlist of my favorite Sleater-Kinney songs around 10 years ago and drew heavily on that as a starting point for this playlist. The Hot Rock is kind of the sleeper of the Sleater-Kinney catalog, it was the only album they released from 1996 to 2005 that placed outside the top 10 in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. But I love that album, it kind of 'clicked' for me more than Dig Me Out at the time and some days it's still my favorite, I think they fit their instruments together in cool ways on that record, "God Is A Number" and "Living In Exile" rule. 

The Woods is from that period when every band wanted to work with Dave Fridmann and get that blown out drum sound he's famous for, and Sleater-Kinney took it a little further, it sounds like the entire album is in the red. Some people love it, I think it only works perfectly on the closing epic "Let's Call It Love"/"Night Light," which has some of Weiss's best drumming ever. In general, I think One Beat is probably my favorite of their post-'90s albums. The post-reunion albums don't hit quite the same, mostly because they don't wield Corin Tucker's voice like a weapon as much, but there's still some excellent songs on those records.