When Mary Timony went back to the drawing board and found some drunk and stompy guitar riffs to back Ex Hex, it was perhaps a sign: all the pussyfooting of the past couple of years was over, and a new era had dawned. This didn’t actually become clear, however, until Sleater-Kinney finally saw fit to unleash The Woods on an unsuspecting populace.

The reaction you’ll have to The Woods, if you give it enough time, is as complex as the road Sleater-Kinney took to get here from 2002’s One Beat. First things first: yes, the whole album makes it sound as though you’ve blown out your speakers. This is an intense annoyance at first, especially when you read comments from the band about getting noisier and dirtier, when all you’re really thinking is how great the album would sound if it weren’t covered in layers of needless distortion. You feel the need to turn down the volume just to get anything intelligible, which would seem to defeat the purpose. But if you let the songs sink in long enough, you’ll realize that the gambit pays off in a way you might not have expected: the songs sound bigger on record than they do live. Soon enough you’ll be cranking this up louder and louder, to the point where nothing in your collection (or, at least, anything in my collection) can match the sheer terror-inducing wall of sound.

It’s a loud, surly and passionate record, and one no one had any right to expect from Sleater-Kinney; while One Beat was well received, the constant concern was that the formula pioneered on Dig Me Out and The Hot Rock had finally reached its apex, and could only get more and more stale from here on in. How wrong we were.

Now that hipsters are the new hotness and indie bands get airplay on nationally televised commercials without anyone blinking an eye, indie rock finds itself going through an interesting new stage of its life cycle as a genre. Although it’s not quite as irrelevant as, say, “alternative rock” as a label for describing a type of music, it’s also true that nearly everything that’s reached a certain level of popularity in North America has been labeled “indie.” Thus, for the past little while, indie music has endured a series of stylistic tidal waves: college rock, lo-fi, math rock, emo, electroclash, and finally dancepunk, with tons of smaller movements peppered liberally throughout that timeline.

Radio 4 had the good fortune to release Gotham! just as dancepunk began to gain traction. The Rapture released “House Of Jealous Lovers” in 2002, thus ensuring that for the next year at least, indie kids would dance feverishly (if self-consciously) to at least one song during the pre-show playlist at concerts. !!!’s 2001 effort included the spastic “Intensify,” the closest thing dancepunk had to a gospel song, thanks to the crazy vocal breakdown during the song’s bridge.

By both those standards, Radio 4 was fairly demure; while there was something irresistable about tracks like “Our Town,” it wasn’t so extreme or different that people who’d never go near a dancefloor could still rock out to it. And “Our Town” had a secret weapon up its sleeve: arguably it’s also the easiest and most natural song of the three to dance to. Not quite as spare and standoff-ish as “House of Jealous Lovers,” and with a simpler, more infectious beat than “Intensify,” “Our Town” should’ve been the perfect gateway song for indie rock fans into the world of dancepunk.

Of course, Radio 4 was never able to capitalize fully on its early successes, and essentially sealed its fate with 2004’s atrocious and self-parodying Stealing of a Nation. And now the game’s completely different: now that the indiscriminate mass of influences and musical touchstones that is indie music has gone mainstream, there’s a new problem afoot. No longer are there big trends that sweep through the indie community like wildfire. If anything, the trend today is the hipster image, more so than ever before. And while I’m glad we don’t have to chase down the Next Big Thing, the question remains: if indie music even exists anymore as a distinct genre of music, where does it go next?

There are two ways to put on a good live show. The first is to multiply everything by five—the beats, the bass, the volume, the tempo—and blow the doors off the venue. The second is to play up the one thing a studio album could never give you: the warmth and intimacy of being in the same room with the audience. Last night, Rilo Kiley gave us plenty of the former; “Love And War (11/11/46)” was suitably loud and crunchy, and the excessive tendencies of “Does He Love You?” work even better in concert.

But it was the quiet moments that came off the best. The single-song encore of “With Arms Outstretched” managed the near-impossible feat of getting a bunch of indie kids to sing the verses on their own, in unison. That alone would’ve made last night’s show a good concert, but I imagine it’s the sight and sound of Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis sharing a mic for the last verses of “So Long” that will be burned into the memories of the first ten rows of the crowd. They screwed up the lyrics, giggled a bit like schoolchildren, then got down to the task of skewering everyone’s hearts on their softly-sung words. As if you didn’t already love them enough.

Frank also went to the show, and he’ll have pictures to boot.

It took a while, but it’s finally happened: through the wonders of the internet, Grey Will Fade is now available in the U.S. at domestic prices. You now have no excuse not to pick up one of the best albums from last year—and just in time for the summer, too. Now all that’s left is for her to come Stateside for a solo tour (though the next best thing has happened—her day-job gig with Ash took her through North America in March and April).

You’ve probably already heard about Sleater-Kinney’s plea to their fans not to download the leaked MP3s of The Woods, due out May 24th on Sub Pop. That’s part of the reason why you haven’t seen any of those tracks appear on the site until now; “Entertain” was put on the internet by Sub Pop, and so can be considered legitimate. The bigger reason, though, was because I’m of two minds about downloading advance or leaked albums, and I imagine a lot of Sleater-Kinney fans felt the same way: I want to hear the album now, but I also don’t want to ruin the surprise. So aside from one other track that I’ve listened to (sometimes you just can’t help the inevitable) and the concert I saw in February, this is the first exposure I’ve had to The Woods.

1999’s The Hot Rock and 2000’s All Hands On The Bad One have served as templates for the latter-day Sleater-Kinney sound. Before The Hot Rock, Sleater-Kinney songs were best explained by a sliding scale: soft to loud. The self-titled debut was a little rawer than Call The Doctor, and ditto Call The Doctor over Dig Me Out; it wasn’t until The Hot Rock that the basic formula started to change to the extent where the band could no longer be considered anything close to the riot-grrl sound. The Hot Rock introduced a subtlety and a complexity to the “Corin + geetars + drums” blueprint. Carrie Brownstein started to take a more prominent vocal role, and the intricate weaving of Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s vocals is an element that is sadly absent from subsequent albums.

All Hands On The Bad One veered away from its predecessor’s sound, and can essentially be considered “the pop album.” It’s Sleater-Kinney at its poppiest, with the cleanest production job yet and more than a dash of sweet harmonies. One Beat introduced some new elements, but is still very much a product of All Hands and The Hot Rock. Some of the vocal complexity is back, but the hooks of All Hands remained. Which left critics wondering: is this all there is? After six albums, some were beginning to find Sleater-Kinney very consistent—and a bit tired.

The band agreed, and took a lot of time off. It’s pretty clear from comments Brownstein has made that Tucker’s new son, while a major impetus for the break, was certainly not the only reason. Everyone had experienced a bit of burnout, just as they had after the tour for All Hands On The Bad One, and concentrated on other projects for a while. By the time the trio returned to the studio, a new goal had surfaced: to inject some new excitement into what had become, for them, a bit of a job. Hence “Entertain,” a sprawling epic that clocks in under five minutes. Compared to the material on the band’s last two albums, “Entertain” is a maze of hooks and verses. The live jams that the band plays have finally started to bleed into their recorded material; “Entertain” feels less like a self-contained pop song and more like a journey. And yet it’s just as immediate as some of the best material on the two “poppier” albums. More so than the horns or the keyboards on One Beat, the embrace of more complex and unpredictable song structures is exciting—perhaps The Woods will be an album you can really inhabit in a way you couldn’t with the others.