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.