Decades are lived, and then scavenged: so goes the endlessly turning
spit of popular culture. For the paranoid among us, this cycle seems to
have accelerated in recent years, perhaps, in part, because the
artifacts of those bygone eras—clothes, songs, television shows,
ideologies—are now unmoored in time. Nothing is lost, or relegated to
memory. It’s possible that we have never before lived in such close
conversation with the recent past. (You want a scrunchie? I can get you a scrunchie.)

This week, the Breeders, one of the most important alternative-rock
bands of the nineteen-nineties, released “All Nerve,” their excellent
fifth album, and the first since “Mountain Battles,” released in 2008.
Although the Breeders have been around for nearly thirty years, “All Nerve”
feels contemporary, and not because the band abruptly updated its
approach to music-making. Rather, the Breeders’ aesthetic has become
omnipresent in the decades since its début.

Kurt Cobain famously listed “Pod,” the Breeders’ first record, from
1990, as having shaped his work with Nirvana. (“The main reason I like
them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is
totally unique, very atmospheric,” he told Melody Maker, in 1992.)
Now the band’s influence is more ambient, but still plainly in
evidence. Kim Deal’s cool, shifting rock dirges—the unpredictable
structures Cobain admired—are what make the Breeders so thrilling to
listen to, and so tempting to replicate. I can hear remnants of “Pod” on
recent records by Courtney Barnett, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker; Deal’s
songwriting has long been foundational to enduring arena bands like
Radiohead and the National.

“All Nerve” notably reunites the lineup—the sisters and guitarists Kim
and Kelley Deal, the drummer Jim Macpherson, and the bassist Josephine
Wiggs—responsible for “Last Splash,” the band’s best and best-known LP, from 1993.
Maybe because the Breeders started out as a side project for everyone
involved—the first iteration was anchored by Kim, who was then playing
in Pixies; Wiggs, of the Perfect Disaster; Tanya Donelly, of Throwing
Muses; and Britt Walford, of Slint—its albums have always sounded
gloriously unburdened. It’s the kind of liberation that a person
indulges while on vacation—things that wouldn’t make sense on an
ordinary day come to seem reasonable. Why not have a banana-daiquiri
shot and then plunge down a zip line in your swimsuit?

I last spoke with the Breeders in 2013, on the twentieth anniversary of “Last Splash.” (The
band was photographed,
sopping wet, at the Metropolitan Recreation Center, in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn; it is still the only interview I’ve ever done while hugging a
pool noodle.) After Donelly left the Breeders, to form Belly, Kim asked Kelley
to forgo her salaried job as an analyst for a defense contractor, learn
guitar, and join the Breeders on tour. Kelley’s clumsiness on the
instrument became part of the Breeders’ sound; it gave “Last Splash” a
wobbly, punk-rock quality. In the nineties, as now, virtuosity was not a
particularly desirable attribute. (“Advertising looks and chops a must!”
Stephen Malkmus hollered, sarcastically, on Pavement’s “Cut Your
Hair,” from 1994.)
“There’s something about somebody who doesn’t know,” Kelley told me.
“They don’t add any finesse—there’s no affectation to their playing.
That’s something we really value sonically. It sounds authentic and
genuine. For me, it was never about ‘Oh, I have all this virtuosity, but
I’m just going to put it away and carve my own path.’ I never had that.
I’m still just all right, and it works for me.”

These days, what feels most remarkable about the Breeders is
extra-musical: the band is anchored by three women in their fifties,
none of whom, incidentally, chose to breed. They haven’t ceded their
pulpit to a younger generation or disappeared into a domestic routine.
Their tenacity is perhaps unsurprising. The Deal sisters grew up in the
late nineteen-seventies, in Dayton, Ohio, where the local rock scene
wasn’t especially open to young women. (“You know the NGA kids: No Girls
Allowed,” Kim said later. “Motherfuckers.”) They may not have been
welcome in the black-lit, tapestried basements where their male peers
were frantically committing Led Zeppelin licks to memory, but they
persisted, nonetheless.

As a result, the Breeders are a model not simply for the timelessness of
good art—the ways in which ingenuity boomerangs—but for what women can
accomplish, regardless of whether the culture ever rises up to
support them. Kim Deal hasn’t done any of the things that we expect girls to
do onstage—she never preened, confessed, flirted, demurred, or
compromised. She writes rough, occasionally discordant, non-narrative
songs about who knows what. (I can’t discern its meaning, but still laugh
every time Deal spits, with great authority, “Wait in the car / I got business” on “Wait in the
Car,” a new song.) Her
voice is icy and sometimes disinterested, as if she requires little in
the way of acceptance or exculpation. In the single “Cannonball,” from
“Last Splash,” when she sings, “I’ll be your whatever you want,” it
feels less about embodying someone else’s fantasy and more about
removing herself from it entirely. It’s in this way that the Breeders
remain a modern band.