the record to sound different than Dig Me Out, to make each song have a real strong personality". The album was written over the course of a year, which was the longest period the band had spent on making an album. It was recorded at the Avast! recording studio in Seattle, Washington in July 1998. Music and lyrics The Hot Rock marks a considerable change in the band's sound, veering into a more relaxed and gloomy direction than the raucous punk rock style of its predecessors. As Rolling Stone noted, Sleater-Kinney "delved into more oblique sounds [...] Brownstein's abandoned power chords to slither in abstract patterns, backed by Weiss' increasingly subtle and complex drumming [and] Tucker expanded her vocal range steering from bellow to fragile ululations". Likewise, The Village Voice writer Sara Sherr considered The Hot Rock to be Sleater-Kinney's darkest album. Brownstein remarked that the album's sound and lyrics were heavily influenced by the music of The Go-Betweens. Unlike previous Sleater-Kinney albums, most of the lyrical themes on The Hot Rock are more intimate, exploring failed relationships and personal uncertainty. As Weiss recalled, the songs are "really honest, even if they're sometimes unpleasant. The lyrics evoke so many emotions. Our analogies are visual and the metaphors are direct. Corin and Carrie are singing about things they care about". The album features a notable amount of vocal and guitar interplay between Tucker and Brownstein, who interweave their voices and play off each other to create very atmospheric songs such as "The End of You" and "Burn Don't Freeze". Music critic Robert Christgau said that "even reading the booklet it's hard to keep track of who's saying what to whom about what, as if they'd fallen in love with (or to) the Velvets' 'Murder Mystery'". The title track "Hot Rock", named after the 1972 film of the same name, notes the similarities between relationships and jewelry heists. The song "Banned from the End of the World" deals with the Y2K crisis and an uncertain future, while "God Is a Number" alludes to the impact of technology in society. The single "Get Up" features lead guitar lines by Brownstein and staccato riffs by Tucker. For Tucker, the song reflects the album's thematic structure: "It's more metaphorical and spiritual [...] It's not about one concrete thing; it's about searching for meaning and maybe finding it an unexpected place". The tracks "The Size of