Every Sunday, the Free Review highlights the most significant releases of the week. This week, we tackle new albums from Sleater-Kinney and Green Day, as well as tracks from Adrainne Lenker; Jlin & Philip Glass; Faye Webster & Lil Yachty; and Kim Gordon.

Albums

Sleater-Kinney Little Rope

Indie rock legends Sleater-Kinney have spent the last five years finding their footing, acclimating to the modern soundscape and readjusting after internal collapse. Little Rope is the band’s best album since their 2015 comeback album, No Cities to Love, and a marked improvement over Path of Wellness, their first record after the departure of founding member and drummer Janet Weiss. The record is perhaps their darkest, informed by the specter of an ailing society and the death of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather in a car accident last year. It exists miles apart from their “riot grrrl” origins or the visceral thrash of 2005’s temporary swan song The Woods, but it’s raw in a way that their music hasn’t been in almost two decades.

While the band’s own production on Wellness felt brittle, John Congleton’s work here is crisp and bold, painting the songs here in dark, muted colors while maintaining their punch. The two remaining founding members are also in peak form - it’s truly refreshing to hear Corin Tucker’s banshee wail unleash in the early moments of “Hell,” and Carrie Brownstein’s snotty swagger come alive on the pulverizing “Needlessy Wild.” New member Angie Boylan’s drumming is serviceable, even if it lacks the violence of Weiss’s legendary work on records like Dig Me Out and One Beat. But the arrangements on tracks like “Hunt You Down” and “Six Mistakes” feel like successful, more modern interpretations of the band’s existing sound.

Little Rope is an emotional rollercoaster, showcasing some of the band’s best and most evocative songwriting. “Hell” is a dank, foreboding opener that summons the essence of the world that’s crumbling around us - “hell is desperation,” Tucker sings, “any young man with a gun” - and “Say It Like You Mean It” is a touching, sprawling power ballad that begs for gentleness in the face of unforgiving loss. Explosive closer “Untidy Creature” is thrillingly defiant, pulsing with the ecstatic energy the band is known best for - “you built a cage, but your measurement’s wrong,” Tucker sings, “’cause I’ll find a way and I’ll pick your lock.”

Sleater-Kinney are a different band than they were a decade or three ago, but Tucker and Brownstein make use of their existing, unbending chemistry to create a record that sounds both modern and nostalgic. Little Rope is a powerful, career-reviving album that gives hope to their future as a duo, and showcases their unbreakable strength as a unit in the midst of emotional turmoil. C+

Green Day Saviors

At this point in their thirty-plus year career, one pretty much knows what to expect from Green Day. They’re a pop punk institution, a legacy band that’s too big to fail, comfortable enough not to push themselves in new or challenging directions. Predictably, their fourteenth album, Saviors, offers little in the way of ingenuity - it’s not necessarily a bad album, but it’s not all that different from anything they’ve put out over the last two decades.

It’s the band’s first album to be produced by longtime collaborator Rob Cavallo since 2013’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tré! trilogy, and their first release since 2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers, a dad rock record that is truly not as bad as its reputation would suggest (in fact, it might be their lowest stakes, highest return album since their formative years). On Saviors, they make a soft return to their specific brand of protest music, but the songs are too polished to facilitate the pseudo-political message they’re attempting to sell.

The album’s strengths and weaknesses are apparent in its opening number, “The American Dream is Killing Me.” The cut is immediately reminiscent of the title track from American Idiot, the record that pulled them back from the nearing edge of obscurity (after 2000’s commercial flop, but underrated artistic success, Warning) and made them into America’s biggest rock band. That record funneled W. Bush-era tensions and Iraq War anxiety into a massive, half-cocked rock opera that worked best as a stand-alone piece, outside of its shoddily constructed context. Billie Joe Armstrong has never been a master wordsmith, and the band’s attempts at social commentary have always been a bit on-the-nose; “The American Dream is Killing Me” struggles for the same reason that American Idiot did, even if its punk-lite production goes down pretty smoothly.

The album’s mid-tempo plod and bright, hissing sheen become exhausting by its first ballad “Goodnight Adeline,” which doesn’t quite reach the emotional peak it aims for. The slow-burning “Suzie Chapstick” works better, despite the lyric “will I ever see your face again / not just photos from an Instagram,” the diction of which sounds very much like it’s coming from a man in his forties struggling to reckon with a very online culture. Much more painful is “Strange Days are Here to Stay,” a song which deadpans the lyrics “grandma’s on the fentanyl” and “everyone is racist and the Uber’s running late,” all the while cribbing the arrangement from Dookie’s “Basket Case.”

There are several highlights; “Look Ma, No Brains!” is a solid, if obsessively polished, imitation of their early work, and “Bobby Sox” is an anthemic love song with a decent amount of bite. The brief, furious “Living in the ‘20s” is the most successful song in its vein here, a Sex Pistols-type barn-burner that sounds truly fed up, even if some its lyrical clichés are similarly difficult to digest. Unfortunately, the genuinely touching “Father to a Son,” a lament on raising a child in a dying society, is undercut by crawling closing number “Fancy Sauce,” which bastardizes a lyric from “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” and contends that “we all die young someday.”

In a lot of ways, Saviors is like comfort food for the Green Day fan - it’s safe, familiar, and (occasionally) satisfying, the sound of a band exploring the same pallet they have for decades. It won’t make any new disciples of nonbelievers, and it will likely scratch an obligatory itch for the diehards. It’s a vaguely political statement that fits squarely into the Green Day template, and perhaps that’s all we can hope for. D

Tracks

Adrianne Lenker “Sadness as a Gift”

Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker has developed as a solo artist in parallel with the continuing evolution of her band. “Sadness as a Gift,” the second single from her upcoming album, Bright Future, incorporates a country influence that she’s explored with Big Thief on tracks like Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’s opener, “Change.” But it’s a remarkable shift from December’s “Ruined,” a fragile piano ballad that sounded fundamentally broken and spiritually defeated. “Sadness,” in turn, feels remarkably empowering; it’s a break-up song that finds acceptance through the world’s all-encompassing beauty. “We could see the sadness as a gift” she sings, “and still feel too heavy to hold” - it’s an embrace of emotional complexity, sorrowful but unbroken. Lenker is an expert at mining for these in-between spaces, finding enchantment in the everyday and sadness in its most intricate details. Alone or in collaboration with her band, she’s a tremendous force, and “Sadness as a Gift” is one of her most aching, affecting songs to date.

Jlin & Philip Glass “The Precision of Infinity”

The joining of footwork trailblazer and minimalist icon Philip Glass makes immediate sense. Both artists have found the ecstasy in-between the art of repetition, Jlin’s in evolving symphonies of bass and immaculately syncopated percussion, and Glass’s in the blissful overlap of melody and rhythm. Their first collaboration, “The Precision of Infinity” is perfectly titled - the interplay between Glass’s gorgeous, artfully offbeat piano work and Jlin’s jittery backbone feels like it reaches into forever, even at a relatively brief four mintues and thirty-nine seconds. It registers as landmark work for both artists, more than an intriguing curio, a fleeting moment of brilliance that speaks to decades of evolution in the field of avant-garde music.

**Secretly Canadian, Dead Oceans • 2024**

Faye Webster & Lil Yachty “Lego Ring”

Faye Webster is a singular presence in indie rock, an alt-country singer-songwriter from Atlanta that somehow manages to fold her hometown’s deep hip hop heritage into her music without missing a beat. “Lego Ring,” the most recent single from her upcoming album, Underdressed at the Symphony, is a duet with Lil Yachty, an artist whose recent music has also straddled the line between indie rock and hip hop in unpredictable ways. The song displays a real chemistry between the two artists, who sing in gorgeous harmony, Yachty utilizing his now characteristic Auto-Tune wobble effect. The whole affair buzzes with infatuation, a love song that exists in its own unique crevice of contemporary music.

Kim Gordon “BYE BYE”

Ex-Sonic Youth icon Kim Gordon managed to breathe new life into her music on 2019’s No Home Record, an album that saw her layering her trademark deadpan over twisting art rock arrangements in unfamiliar ways. On “BYE BYE,” the first taste of her upcoming record, The Collective, continues her singular evolution, this time finding the blistering common ground between rage rap and noise rock squalor. It somehow succeeds - the marriage of rap and rock has always required a cautious balance as not to fall into retro cheese or nu-metal unholiness, but Gordon misses these pitfalls by ignoring them altogether. Blistering 808s coexist with screeching guitars, and Gordon’s voice sounds un-aging and ever mesmerizing. Her itemization of what sounds like a list of travel necessities feels like a twist on the materialism essential to trap music’s aesthetic. But where that genre often hyper-fixates on the glamor of jewelry and cars, Gordon’s comes across as hilariously mundane: “contact solution, mascara, lip mask, eye mask, ear plugs, travel shampoo, conditioner.” It’s funny, and it’s supposed to be funny, but Gordon makes it all sound dead serious, toying with elements that should be at odds until they make perfect sense together.