Rocktrospectiva: The Acclaimed "No Cities To Love" Turns 10

Released on 20 January, 2025, "No Cities To Love" was the 8th., studio album by American rock band Sleater-Kinney, the album received universal acclaim from music critics spawning two singles "Bury Our Friends" and "A New Wave". 

 

Considered their 8th., studio album and the wiser, the album is a disarming, liberationist force befitting the Sleater-Kinney canon. The necessity of change the creative virtue of ripping it up and starting again—remains a crucial strand of Sleater-Kinney's DNA. This is still the classic band sound: low-tuned classic rock tropes resuscitated with punk urgency, raw and jagged. 

 

Weiss' massive swoop is still the band's throbbing heart, pumping Sleater-Kinney's blood. But Brownstein has said they set out to find "a new approach to the band" and that is true of No Cities to Love. It is no less emphatic and corporeal than their punk classics Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. But unlike their last two albums of monstrous combat rock, No Cities to Love keeps only the most addictive elements. Catchy as all-clashing hell, it's Sleater-Kinney's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses that reel and reel, enormously shouted and gasped and sung with a dead-cool drawl. 

 

The album had the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment—tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free ever, empathy is Sleater-Kinney's renewable energy source. They have always made a kind of folk music—songs of real people—and opener "Price Tag" is an honest example of this, fueled by Tucker's motherly responsibility. In concrete detail, it describes the struggle of a working class family in the context of American capitalism and financial crisis. Real life power dynamics permeate No Cities, among the rubbery synth lines of the otherwise venomous "Fangless" and the anxious post-hardcore lurch of "No Anthems". On the glammy "Gimme Love", Tucker plainly wants more of that four-letter-word for girls and outsiders.

 

Sleater-Kinney began work on the album in earnest around May 2012, they have said, but especially on the anthemic title track and "Hey Darling"—the first two songs they wrote—you can hear echoes of that decade of pause, an airing out of just why. The titular phrase is abstract enough, but considering Brownstein's vocal incompatibility with the van-show-van-show tour-life void—and her lines, here, about "a ritual of emptiness"—it plays like a direct take on the complicated reality of the rootless rock band and its scattered tribe. On "Hey Darling", one of Tucker's gummiest melodies becomes a letter to fans, reasoning her hiding: "It seems to me the only thing/ That comes from fame is mediocrity," and then, "Sometimes the shout of the room/ Makes me feel so alone." The slow-burn of "Fade", the closer, also takes on Sleater-Kinney's hiatus. Tucker is like a Robert Plant putting her supernatural quasi-operatic range on display over epic, minor-key hard rock, switching from sly-voiced ballad to high-pitched inflection. 

 

Sleater-Kinney's discography is full of songs delivering meta-commentaries on what it means to be women playing rock; The album is more purely personal and explicitly political, evidence enough that in the context of family, middle-age, and multiple careers, it is possible to have everything. For the first time in 21 years, Sleater-Kinney finally had written an album without a proper stomach-twisting tearjerker; no wistful confessions, breathless breakups, or dying lovers.

 

No Cities to Love gained widespread critical acclaim. Certain critics called the album a truly outstanding rock and roll album and the very first finest of that 2015, their best record in their entire career, and pretty much the most perfect comeback in recent years for them, and emotive album full of raging post-punk collection tracks and a jewel in their legacy.

 

No Cities To Love Track List:

 

1. Price Tag

2. Fangless

3. Surface Envy

4. No Cities To Love

5. A New Wave

6. No Anthems

7. Gimme Love

8. Bury Our Friends

9. Hey Darling

10. Fade