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.