Kathleen Hanna’s feminist party band Le Tigre reunite: ‘It’s depressing our lyrics are still relevant 20 years later’

Most bands wring their hands over whether to reunite or not, but for Le Tigre it was easy. The impetus was a festival in Pasadena, Los Angeles, in 2022. “It was three miles from my house,” says frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, laughing. “I was like: ‘I want to do this because I can cruise down the hill and go to the festival and all my friends can come.’” Then they concluded that the rehearsals for the festival – done over video call, and in LA and New York where bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson live – shouldn’t be wasted. They announced a full tour, their first since 2005, which hits the UK in June.

Returning now, with Hanna free from the Lyme disease that severely limited her life for more than eight years, feels cathartic. “Getting back together to perform these songs is a bit of resolution for us artistically,” says Fateman. “We were either under too much pressure from promoting an album or we didn’t totally get to realise our vision, so we’re able to scale it up almost 20 years later, which is a crazy opportunity – who wouldn’t take that?”

Le Tigre were conceived, in Fateman’s words, as a “feminist party band”. Their combination of political messaging and upbeat electro-pop, bright colours and dance moves, made them an unusual fixture on the studiously cool New York indie scene at the turn of the millennium.

After her success as frontwoman of riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill in the early 1990s, Hanna had been depressed and initially uninterested in forming another band. But she and Fateman moved from their home town of Portland, Oregon, to New York City, and started Le Tigre in 1998. Hanna’s voice had matured to become full and resonant and together they asserted what they thought music fans needed at the time: a culture of non-competition and upbeat praise within the group, projected to the wider world. Plus extremely catchy pop songs: take Deceptacon, a sing-a-long about the lack of meaning in popular rock. Or the extensive feminist history lesson contained in Hot Topic (“Tammy Rae Carland and Sleater-Kinney / Vivienne Dick and Lorraine O’Grady”).

In the 2010s, the band played a handful of shows on a “case-by-case basis”. The decade was a strange one for feminism. As Fateman notes: “I’m not saying Barack Obama was a perfect president but he represented a breath of fresh air for us coming out of the George W Bush years. So I definitely didn’t feel as despairing during that period about legislative gains for women and sexual minorities.”

Meanwhile, feminism went mainstream. Hanna was frequently asked questions such as: is it problematic that Beyoncé performs in front of the word feminist? “There’s a million ways to discredit political movements and that’s one of them,” she says.

“I think that a lot of those critiques in the mainstream are basically: ‘Miley Cyrus says she’s a feminist so it’s not real any more and we shouldn’t be associated with it.’ It’s just a clickbait conversation that hasn’t got anything to do with what is really going on.”

The 2010s also saw the rise of gender-critical feminism, especially in the UK. Fateman speaks for the band – Samson is a pioneering genderqueer musician – when she says: “Let’s go on the record for your newspaper that we are completely against that kind of feminism, if you want to call it feminism.”

Feminist activism remained a centralising part of their lives post-Le Tigre. Fateman bought a hair salon and worked as a feminist writer and art critic. Samson toured with Peaches and her own band Men, while working as an arts professor at New York University. Hanna was in a band called the Julie Ruin, which she stopped due to her illness. “Lyme disease was making it impossible for me to tour,” she says. “It was hard for me to hide the amount of pain that I was in.” She began a business to fund women’s education in Togo, west Africa, worked on a documentary about Darcelle XV, her second cousin and the world’s oldest living drag queen, and wrote a memoir, to be published next year. “It was a therapeutic endeavour of organising the narrative of my life,” she says. “Like, am I the hero of my own story? Is there a happy ending? I need to wrap up some of my past activity to be present in the now.”

Samson says: “We’re all much more connected to ourselves, therefore it’s a great opportunity for us to connect more with each other.” She adds that Le Tigre’s songs make as much sense as they did nearly 20 years ago: “We realised that a lot of the lyrics are still relevant, and that of course feels depressing.” Those lyrics will be projected behind them as they play, “a reminder of what a struggle we’re all facing now”.

But don’t expect another Le Tigre album soon. “We haven’t exhausted this material,” says Hanna. “It’s still challenging and exciting to perform, and I’m understanding nuances in the songs that I didn’t notice before. I’m having real pride in our songwriting and so I don’t see any need to write anything new.”

The glitchy, political FYR (Fifty Years of Ridicule) is one of those still-relevant songs, named after Shulamith Firestone, who wrote that for every 10 years of feminist activism there will be 50 years of ridicule. Hanna finds it validating because she feels Le Tigre are often left out of the canonisation of punk and indie. “There are countless articles where people who were operating at the same time are put on a list of innovators and we’re left out,” she says. “I didn’t get in this band to be on any stupid list. But it’s interesting.”

Having toured extensively with Bikini Kill over the past few years, Hanna understands her position as a rare middle-aged female punk. “I’m 54 and playing punk shows and 10-year-olds are coming,” she says. “It’s pretty amazing to create atmospheres where there are all these different generations in the room because there is so much division between generations. Like, I’m more educated than you, or I know this language and you don’t. Or older people being like: ‘#MeToo, we dealt with it quietly, so why are you making so much fuss?’” Live shows, to her, are about getting off the internet as feminists and gathering together.

Even Hanna, known for scrawling feminist slogans on her chest and wearing neon hot pants, wonders how she is supposed to present herself now. “I’ve gotten a lot of messages from women who are around my age, saying: ‘I started to feel as if I didn’t belong in the punk scene any more and you made me feel like I can keep doing what I want to do.’ That feels like the ultimate goal for success. It’s hard to age as a punk, even a feminist electronic punk.”

Her audiences have occasionally reflected this change back to her. “People yell out ‘Mom’ to me and it’s funny, but it’s also offensive. Because I’m over a certain age, I’m like their parent now, or their riot grandma, and that kind of ageism just reinforces the idea that you’re only valuable if you have children, or if you’re a fuckable girl in the scene. Those are your two choices.”

But that’s so silly and reductive, Hanna says. “When Le Tigre come on stage, none of the stereotypes make any sense any more and that’s what we want to be: something intense and artistic that makes stupid, boring mediocre stuff dissolve.”