Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Sep 12, 2019The Center Won’t Hold is what most respected musicologists would term a “good album with some great songs.”
-
Aug 19, 2019The strangest thing about the album, however, is the nagging sense of try-hard: Sleater-Kinney have always felt effortless.
-
Aug 14, 2019The Center Won’t Hold clocks in at just over a 30 minutes and lacks a certain spark—a song with the barn-burning intensity of “Entertain” or the heartrending emotion of “One More Hour.” In many places, these songs feel derivative in a way that the band’s music never has before.
-
Aug 16, 2019Much of “The Center Won’t Hold” doesn’t sound like the old Sleater-Kinney, which is precisely the point. Brownstein and Tucker prefer to go charging into the future, but at the expense of some of the very attributes that made them so compelling in the first place.
-
Aug 16, 2019What's absent about The Center Won't Hold is that it presents a powerful and necessary premise, only to find out that there's not much of a message behind it. Sleater Kinney sure have a lot to say, but overall, they don't end up saying much.
-
Aug 14, 2019Too many of the new songs sound diligent and derivative, as if Sleater-Kinney were working through a pop apprenticeship. It’s good to know that the group doesn’t want to repeat itself, that the band is also out to master 21st-century digital tools. But on “The Center Won’t Hold,” Sleater-Kinney hasn’t found its version 2.0.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 31 out of 42
-
Mixed: 8 out of 42
-
Negative: 3 out of 42
-
Aug 20, 2019
-
Aug 17, 2019
-
Jul 6, 2020