Riot Grrrl Royalty Bikini Kill Returning to Denver for First Time in Decades

We interrupt your doomscrolling to bring you breaking news: Bikini Kill is back!

The seminal Riot Grrrl three-piece of vocalist/bassist Kathleen Hanna, drummer Tobi Vail and guitarist/bassist Kathi Wilcox first reunited in 2017 for a one-off show for friend Jenn Pelly’s book release, but eventually decided to keep going after a ten-year hiatus.

“We didn’t have any plans to do anything after that,” Vail admits. “Then it ended up happening, so it felt really nice to be collaborating again.”

The influential Washington State trio is playing Mission Ballroom on Tuesday, August 27, along with Sweeping Promises. Although the exact date is unknown, Vail shares that it’s been at least two decades since Bikini Kill rolled through town during the band’s original run, from 1990 to ’97. And it might be the last time, too.

“We have no plans of doing anything after this. There are no guarantees,” Vail says about any post-tour happenings. “If people want to see us, they will come out to these shows, because they might not get another chance. We don’t want to say this is the last time we’re ever doing anything, but it might be.”

That includes new music, though that might change.

“At first we weren’t interested in that at all, but now we’re talking about it, so we’ll see what happens,” Vail says.
For now, Bikini Kill is still pounding out all the hits from that golden era of 1990s underground punk when the three friends from Olympia’s Evergreen State College first started sharing their supercharged feminist anthems, particularly on albums Pussy Whipped (1993) and Reject All American (1996).

At the time, the trio led a new-wave feminist movement in the DIY scene, alongside peers Sleater-Kinney and Bratmobile, which the music press coined Riot Grrrl punk. The phrase was regularly used in the band’s zine, Bikini Kill. While Vail has since been credited with the stylization of “girl” back then, she doesn’t really remember its origins.

“I mean, I guess that’s what people have decided. I did use that in my fanzine before [the Riot Grrrl zine],” she explains, adding that she and fellow Riot Grrrl innovator Donna Dresch of Team Dresch have tried to figure it out, but can’t pinpoint who actually brought it up first.

“I read it on Wikipedia that I came up with that, so let’s just go with that,” she says unassumingly.

Regardless, to her, it was a small way to define and relate to the emerging feminist movement that was happening.

“I think I used to say it was kind of a way to comment on what I felt was the annoying habit of women in feminism being spelled with a ‘Y’ or something or without the word ‘men’ in it. But I don’t care. I don’t even know if that’s true,” Vail says now.

“Part of it was reclaiming the word ‘girl’ to make it more powerful. There was a lot of pressure to be like, ‘Don’t call yourself a girl. You should call yourself a woman.’ But I didn’t really relate to the word ‘woman,’ whether it was I was immature or what,” she continues. “I was also thinking, ‘What’s so wrong with being a girl? Why shouldn’t girls be allowed to be feminists?’ Or it had an implication of being feminine or something. And I was like, ‘What’s wrong with being feminine?’ That could be feminism, too.”

As Bikini Kill’s stature and reputation grew, people were quick to define what Riot Grrrl was and meant. But the coverage during the 1990s was often problematic and ultimately misrepresented what the band was all about.

“There was a lot of sexism in the mainstream media coverage. It was validating in the sense that you were just like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is why we have to create our own media,’ because mainstream media at that time was extremely sexist,” Vail adds.

Bikini Kill shows were also known to get violent and antagonistic. By 1997, a break was necessary. But with the passage of time, history has remembered with fondness what Hanna, Vail and Wilcox accomplished and pioneered in those days. One thing that they still do is switch instruments mid-set, depending on the song. All three handle vocals at times, too.

“Live, it worked as a cool thing, because you can be like, even though we’re pretty good musicians in this one realm, we can switch around. And we don’t really know what we’re doing, and we can make a cool song,” Vail explains. “For young women, it was a way to see that they don’t need to be total expert musicians to write something really cool that expresses a feeling or an idea.”

Bikini Kill may not have put out any new material this century, but the craziest thing is it hasn’t needed to. As much as times change, they stay the same, and the band's songs are just as pertinent nowadays as they were then.

“We were on tour when we found out Roe v. Wade was going to be repealed. It just felt really good to be able to bring people together on tour. Even though it was depressing, it was cool,” Vail concludes. “One of the themes that comes up a lot is how relevant the songs are today, because obviously feminism is still relevant, maybe even more so than it was thirty years ago.”

Bikini Kill, with Sweeping Promises, 7 p.m. Tuesday, August 27, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $61