Sleater-Kinney, “The Center Won’t Hold” (Mom + Pop Music)

CHICAGO — In the midst of Sleater-Kinney’s latest album, Corin Tucker sings ominously about a world in which humans feel increasingly disconnected from, well, everything. But the song’s refrain might also apply to her band’s new music: “The future’s here and we can’t go back.”

Though Sleater-Kinney is one of the defining rock bands of the last two decades, it plotted a new course on its ninth studio album, “The Center Won’t Hold” (Mom + Pop Music). The trio telegraphed its ambitions by hiring St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, as a producer.

Coming off an art-rock peak with her 2017 album, “Masseduction,” Clark helped shift Sleater-Kinney’s approach to arranging: a studio-as-instrument approach instead of rock-band-playing-together-in-real-time. Singer-guitarists Tucker and Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss assembled an album that’s more like a pastiche than a performance, brimming with electronic percussion and textures, guitars that sound like violins, and keyboards that sound like guitars.

The title track announces the new direction with clanging percussion, murky atmospherics and eerie vocal interplay. In its second half, the song leaps into a full-on rock rampage, anchored by Weiss’ drums, an after-andbefore juxtaposition of the new-old Sleater-Kinney that’s thrillingly executed.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album isn’t nearly as accomplished. Sleater-Kinney at its best always suggested a triangle, an agitated musical conversation among strong-minded equals that sometimes barely could be contained by a three-minute song. The production on “The Center Won’t Hold” disrupts that balance.

Whereas the title track tries to meld the band’s strengths into a new sonic context, much of the rest mutes the animated dialogue between the voices of Brownstein and Tucker, with one or the other dominating the track. And Weiss, one of the best rock drummers on the planet, is even less of a factor, her essential role diminished as both a driving force in the arrangements and as an astute, agile commentator – a third “voice” in the mix alongside the two singers.

Little wonder that after the album was completed, Weiss quit the band. “The band is heading in a new direction and it is time for me to move on,” she announced on July 1.

That came as heartbreaking news to many Sleater-Kinney fans, and for good reason. When Weiss was at her best, Sleater-Kinney roared. But that isn’t her role on “The Center Won’t Hold,” as she takes a back seat to what sounds like a song swap between Brownstein and Tucker.

The album front-loads a few catchy pop songs, perfectly acceptable place-holders but nothing to rival the peak moments on classic Sleater-Kinney albums such as “Dig Me Out” (1997) or “The Woods” (2005). Even the band’s post-hiatus reunion, “No Cities to Love” (2015), packed more wallop.

“Hurry on Home” and “Reach Out” play like bookends on lust with hooky refrains, “Can I Go On” flirts with doo-wop backing vocals amid its reverberating electro-rock soundscape, and “The Future is Here” blends melody and foreboding. But some of the experimentation verges on self-parody: the goth melodrama of “Ruins,” the giddy gimmickry of “Love,” the disco tropes of “Bad Dance.” A lounge ballad arrangement undercuts the #MeToo heartache underlying “Broken.”

Much of “The Center Won’t Hold” doesn’t sound like the old Sleater-Kinney, which is precisely the point. Brownstein and Tucker prefer to go charging into the future, but at the expense of some of the very attributes that made them so compelling in the