Songfacts®:

• "Hell" is the opening track of Sleater-Kinney's 11th album, Little Rope. The record was released against the backdrop of a family tragedy, when band member Carrie Brownstein's mother and stepfather were killed in a car crash while on holiday in Italy in late 2022.
• For the first time since 2005's The Woods, Carrie Brownstein stepped back from the mic, focusing on the searing guitar work that has always been a Sleater-Kinney hallmark. Corin Tucker took center stage vocally, her voice a powerful counterpoint to the musical maelstrom.
  
  For Brownstein, playing guitar on the album became a lifeline during her period of grief. "Just knowing what to do with my hands when I couldn't believe I was even walking, it was very crucial," she explained to NME. "It gave shape and meaning to my days almost like meditation or prayer. I felt like I was having this love affair with the instrument again, feeling and seeing it in a new way."
• Tucker's lyrics for this song grapple with a sense of unease and the pervasiveness of violence in the world. It's not a literal depiction of hell, but rather a metaphor for the darker aspects of the human experience.
  
  "This song really came about organically when I was in a record store listening to music in LA," Tucker told Apple Music. "It was one of those moments where the lyrics just started coming to me and the emotion of feeling like I was having this revelation about what we normalize in our society, the way that we normalize violence, the way that we have accommodated it. It's supposed to be a moment of shock of waking up to that and realizing it in that moment."
• Little Rope saw Tucker and Brownstein work alongside producer John Congleton [The Killers, Eddie Vedder, St. Vincent], having long admired his approach to the studio.
  
  "We had wanted to work with John Congleton for years, but the timing has never been quite right," Tucker told Uncut magazine. "He has such great taste and we come from a similar musical background. The idea of a non-traditional approach to music is still a big part of our songwriting. 'Hell,' for instance, is so strange. It's like half chords and very avant-garde and John created an underlying soundscape that introduces that to the listener. Our structure is a little avant-garde and skeletal at times and he could fill that out."
• The album's title speaks to the duality of experience. "A little rope could signify the darkest moment for someone, a desire to end it all," Brownstein explained to Apple Music, "but it could also conversely be the thing that someone throws to you to rescue you, to pull you from the muck and the mud."
• Corin Tucker calls "Hell" one of the album's "anchor tracks." It's sadness "speaking to a lot of what's going on in the United States right now," she explained to Mojo magazine.
• Cinematographer Ashley Connor, a longtime collaborator of Angel Olsen, directed the black-and-white video for "Hell." It stars filmmaker and writer Miranda July, a Sleater-Kinney associate since 1994 when she saw Brownstein and Tucker's early acts (punk rock group Excuse 17 and riot grrrl band Heavens to Betsy) play Berkeley, California. In July 2015, Miranda directed the video for the comeback single "Bury Our Friends."