Today, Sleater-Kinney share new single, “Say It Like You Mean It,” with a video directed by Carrie Brownstein starring Succession’s J. Smith-Cameron. The track features an unforgettable, unadorned riff backing a raw examination of a relationship coming apart. It’s an exposed nerve ending of a song, and Smith-Cameron exudes unbridled truth when Corin Tucker sings “Say it like you mean it / I need to hear it before you go / Say it like you mean it / This goodbye hurts when you go.”
“The video tells the story of a woman who’s lost all sense of what’s appropriate,” Brownstein explains. “Sick with the alienation that stems from existing in a disparate emotional state from the person or people closest to her, she grapples with debilitating loss, desires to be seen, and dares you to leave.”
For the video, the band worked with Desert Island Studios, a minority-owned production company, studio facility, and membership collective working to remove barriers in the media industry for historically marginalized communities.
Last month the band announced their eleventh studio album, Little Rope, out January 19via Loma Vista, with the a powerfully intimate “Hell.” The track was called “big, bold, ferocious and plainspoken,” by Paste Magazine, with the New York Times saying it“breaks wide open with anguish and inconsolable fury, as tolling, elegiac verses erupt into bitter power-chorded choruses. Corin Tucker unleashes her scream on the word ‘why.’”
