Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won’t Hold review – Punk rockers refuse to rest on their laurels

When a band reforms it’s usually a case of playing the old favourites on lucrative tours until boredom sets in.

Influential Washington trio Sleater-Kinney have made things more complicated since they got back together in 2014 — firstly by avoiding laurel-resting and altering their musical palette more than ever, and secondly with some awkward personnel disruption. Janet Weiss, drummer since 1996, quit last month in the middle of promotional duties for this ninth album, saying: “The band is heading in a new direction and it is time for me to move on.”

It seems to have come as a shock to Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, who had been enthusing about the added value brought by new star producer Annie “St Vincent” Clark. Songs such as Can I Go On, with its easy electronic pulse and stabs of melodic guitar, and the massed voices on The Dog/The Body, do sound more like St Vincent than the unhinged Sleater-Kinney of old, whose savage punk was perpetually on the edge of falling apart.

Lyrically, darkness is still to the fore. Broken, a rare piano ballad, reflects on #MeToo and Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The cynical, menacing Bad Dance proposes dancing while the world ends. But musically, they’re more bright and hummable than ever before. That may repel the long-term faithful, but newcomers could find that feminist punk rock is suddenly more accessible.