“The stakes are much higher now.”
Carrie Brownstein speaks to Victoria Segal.
How is making the second post-comeback album different?
“I’m really proud of No Cities To Love but it’s hard to differentiate between reception of the record and affection for our return. What helped was looking out in the audience and realising that we had fans both young and old, that it wasn’t just wholly about nostalgia. But I think the stakes are much higher for The Center Won’t Hold because you’re essentially committing to a middle period of the band. To dedicate yourself to creating a part of your art that will be assessed both in relation to the earlier period and on its own is a lot of pressure.”
Did you have musical reference points?
“Corin was talking about Depeche Mode and I’d been listening to Ministry’s The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste. Then we were talking a lot about the gothic. That genre can express darkness in a way that is not just about loudness. I was seeing a lot of theatre in New York: People, Places, Things, a play from England I loved with Denise Gough, and The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe. I felt entranced by these narratives of trauma. Corin and I talked a lot about looking out at the political fractiousness and fragility, and couching that in personal stories.”
You initially considered working with multiple producers: why did you settle with Annie Clark?
“We worked with Annie first and the union of her and us just seemed so fruitful and inspired. She wanted to rearrange the toolbox and reassemble the band in a way that didn’t lose sight of who we were. We recorded Hurry On Home in the first session. The song used to start with a guitar line but Annie was very excited to work with Corin and Corin’s singing so she had Corin put a batch of vocals in that wall of sound. When someone takes an element like Corin’s singing voice and figures out a new way of presenting it to the world – and to us – that sealed the deal. That was the record we wanted to make – it felt like something was breaking open.”
What is the Bad Dance?
“There are always people who embrace the corruption, who revel in the depravity, and I think in that song that there is that almost embracing of the destruction. At the same time, it’s an acknowledgement that many of us, especially women, have always been the ones who are most adept at dealing with that mess. In the verses, it is like this corrupt narrator with a megaphone, a deranged creature – but the choruses are more about the choreography of survival that we’ve always learned. And we will survive, because we’ve always had to. Did you see that movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I’ve seen that movie, like, 10 times – I find it unfortunately incredibly relevant in almost any era of corruption. I was thinking of that film, that endless cycle of exhaustion. It’s probably why it sounds so demonic in a kind of vaudeville way.”