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SLEATER-KINNEY were a decade into their career by the time they came to make The Woods. Keen to break away from the boxes their music had been put into, the three piece, made up of Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, signed with Sub-Pop, with The Woods as their first release on the new label. They took to Cassadaga, New York, and enlisted the help of producer Dave Fridmann with the hopes to make something unexpected and bigger than they had before.
Fridmann, who had previously worked with the likes of THE FLAMING LIPS, was critical of their work. Guitarist and vocalist Carrie Brownstein shared in an interview with PEARL JAM’s Eddie Vedder for Maganet Magazine “he thought all of our other records sounded the same. When we got there, he said that they never captured the emotional intensity of our band.”
This drive to amplify their emotional intensity saw the band turning to more dramatic heights than their previous records. In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, guitarist and vocalist Brownstein shared “Janet and I were really embracing harshness and leaning into something sonically and thematically dark. We felt there was a creeping tepidness in music, a cloying softness, as if music were only a salve, not an instigator.” The group would record everything live in the studio. The album’s closing tracks Let’s Call It Love and Night Light were recorded in one continuous take after the group realised they were in the same key.
The desire to make something bigger than they had previously was fueled by their experience opening for PEARL JAM the years prior. Brownstein explained in her memoir “Opening for PEARL JAM enabled and emboldened us, and it instilled in us a desire to write songs that had improvisational moments built in. So on The Woods there are moments that break apart, disintegrate, allow the opportunity to rebuild. Instead of approaching a song as something small, we started big, and we carved smallness and detail out of a broader canvas.”
But the recording process was also greatly tense. Drummer Weiss shared “We knew we wanted something really intense, heavy and aggressive. We pushed ourselves so hard, almost to the point of irritation.” The experience of retreating to isolated Upstate New York wore on all of the members, and especially vocalist and guitarist Tucker who had recently become a mother. Brownstein shared in her memoir “SLEATER-KINNEY were making our scariest record, and Corin was a mother with a young kid; it was natural that in that realm – in parenthood – she wanted to ward off and protect her kin from horrors, to bring light and happiness into her world.” Corin herself shared “The idea of being a role model of a mom and taking care of my son has to be able to just fall away in order to really get to the kind of monstrous characters that are on this record. And that was hard.”
In the album’s lead up, Entertain was released as a single, followed by Jumpers in the September following the album’s release. When the album was released on May 24th 2005, it was met with critical acclaim. It reached number 80 on the US Billboard 200, and number two on the US independent chart. The album was heralded for pushing SLEATER-KINNEY’s position as women in a male dominated field, with Pitchfork noting “this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they’ve been writing since before I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone – rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance.” The Woods has since been recognised for its importance, ranking at number 127 on Pitchfork’s Top 200 Albums of the 2000s and number 72 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of the 2000s.
Carving their space as women in the alternative rock scene, fittingly it is the track Modern Girl that has come to cement the album’s legacy. The slower track traces the realisation embodied with coming of age as a woman, and the journey through this via hunger, joy and anger. Vice retrospectively suggested that “Modern Girl” acts out the gradual realisation – which, in our lives, can sometimes take our entire twenties to fully unfurl in our brains – that the world is not what you had hoped”, framing the track as a parable for the experience of your 20s. Similarly, Far Out reflected “Almost as a leftover from the Riot Grrrl movement, it centres on embracing and incorporating the humanity of existence into womanhood.” Modern Girl has come to cement something larger than The Woods itself – a voice of female disillusionment and anger that still speaks to women twenty years later.
Following the release and touring of The Woods, SLEATER-KINNEY released a statement announcing their hiatus. They wouldn’t reunite until 2014. Yet, despite its tumultuous process, 20 years later, The Woods stands in SLEATER-KINNEY’s discography as a bold assertion of their voice. A turn to the louder and the bigger, SLEATER-KINNEY gave their all to The Woods, and 20 years later, it still gives back to listeners who feel heard in their music.
The Woods was originally released on May 24th, 2005 via Sub Pop.
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