Heavens To Betsy – “Seek and Hide (Live in 1991 at International Pop Underground)” [Video]

Video · Kill Rock Stars

Heavens to Betsy Are Back, and baby’s gone Is Out Today

Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer share live footage from their very first show — Olympia, 1991 — as their first new release in 32 years arrives via Kill Rock Stars.

The video for “seek and hide” features archival footage from the very first Heavens to Betsy performance, at Girl Night in Olympia, Washington in 1991. Two teenage girls jumped on a stage at the IPU festival and sang songs about love and getting their period. The audience cheered. Heavens to Betsy was born. Watching it now, knowing what came next for Corin Tucker — Sleater-Kinney, three decades of one of the most important catalogs in indie rock — is a particular kind of time-travel. The song is performed live, raw and direct, which is exactly right for what this release is.

baby’s gone is out today via Kill Rock Stars, and it is effectively a brand new album: 16 tracks drawn from a never-before-heard demo tape recorded in February 1992 by Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman (who also provides liner notes), plus the 1993 These Monsters Are Real and the 1994 Direction 7“ recordings. The demo tape is a minor miracle — 35 years old, somehow digitized and preserved, arriving now at a moment when everything Heavens to Betsy was writing about in 1992 remains urgently unresolved. Songs about rape culture, body shaming, queerness, intersectional politics, and the strength of female friendship: they documented what they were living through, and gave other women a space to do the same.

The band reunited this summer for their first concert in over 30 years, and the North American fall tour kicked off tonight in Minneapolis. Several dates are already sold out. The Olympia return on October 24 — billed as Girl Night Part 2 — features Calamity Jane, the Softies, Grrrizzly, and DJ Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile. Thirty-five years from where it started.

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