“I DON’T THINK you’re sorry at all/Hit reset,” sings Kathleen Hanna on the title track of the Julie Ruin’s glitchy punk sophomore album. It’s an immediate whiteout, cutting through years of lazy qualifiers about Hanna’s role as a leader of the ’90s riot grrrl movement to something more personal. For the entirety of Hit Reset, Hanna’s at the wheel, careening through her own past with listeners in the passenger seat.
With song titles like “Rather Not,” “Let Me Go,” and “I’m Done,” Hanna revisits trauma on her own terms. Over ominously droning guitar riffs, on “I Decide” she sings, “You may be a thorn I witnessed/A pain I need to co-exist with/But I’ll decide.” Though she carries the pain of childhood abuse, and that of her battle with Lyme disease, for these 13 songs she’s steering the conversation.