Late one night, while assembling a list of potential future shows for the Portland Mercury’s Do This, Do That column, I stared at the website for Killingsworth’s record bar Turn! Turn! Turn! with an unshakeable sense of confusion.
Heavens to Betsy is playing a show? There? Is this a cover band, or some kind of joke?
It turns out that response wasn’t unexpected: “When I saw that it was happening, I thought, ‘Wow, targeted marketing is getting way too good, there’s no way that’s really happening,’” said one local photographer, beaming with joy over the idea of seeing the duo of Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist Corin Tucker and drummer/bassist Tracy Sawyer, returning to their riot grrrl roots. It was no scam: somehow, Heavens to Betsy has returned.
Somehow more surprising about their return was the fact that the pride of Kill Rock Stars and K Records was not just back at it, but that they were doing it as inauspiciously as possible. If this is the first you’re hearing about this show at all, it almost feels like it’s by design; they announced the event not on social media, but via posters on power poles. It didn’t stop it from selling out immediately.
In today’s band reunion cycle, a tidal wave of advance press, interviews, tour announcements, reissues, and the whole nine yards would precede a show like this one. Keeping everything low-profile allowed their unexpected return to feel low-pressure, too, all while feeling a little like stepping out of a time machine that brought you back to the city that old Portlanders still speak of wistfully. (One day later, fellow reunited K Records denizens Heavenly would play a $5 matinee show in the basement record store My Vinyl Underground, as though the universe couldn’t help but oversell that time-warp feeling.)
Filling out the bill was Portland post-punk trio Collate, an act that seemed like they got pulled through that same wormhole. Their sound is ultra-cool, but in a way that doesn’t even seem planned. Their most recent album, 2023’s Generative Systems, sounds like they could have recorded it down the hall while Heavens to Betsy was making Calculated. If you like their music, you can buy it from their label’s website and get it hand-delivered to you. Their set carried the same “fuck it, let’s make it work” energy: when guitarist Jason Nickle had a guitar malfunction, his attempts to fix it found him reaching the point of “good enough.” “This is RIOT-GRRRL!” he exclaimed, as though admitting that whatever perfection he may have been hoping to achieve was beside the point.
Once Tucker and Sawyer took the stage a few minutes before 8 pm, the time warp became complete. Yes, the duo are clearly three decades older, their musicianship is light-years more self-assured, and their stage presence is that of a duo with nothing to prove to anybody, even on a night like this. After opening song “Good Food,” Tucker showed off her truest, most-protective-woman-at-the-punk-show colors: “Does everyone have earplugs? This next one is gonna be LOUD,” she warned, picking up a box of Hearos to pass around the room for anyone laboring under the delusion that they were too cool for hearing protection. You can take the grrrl out of community aid, but you can’t take the community aid out of the grrrl.
For a band shaking off three decades of rust, Tucker and Sawyer rolled with the punches of their setlist exquisitely, using the moments where they were getting back into the rhythm to banter with the crowd. When swapping stage positions, Tucker gave the younger folks a tiny lesson on the trends of the scene they left behind: “Switching instruments was real popular back then!” she said, maneuvering her way back to the drumkit as Sawyer picked up the bass. Partway through, they stopped the show entirely to do Heavens to Betsy trivia, passing out hand-screened T-shirts they made with their original screen, pulled from the depths of a basement to the correct guessers.
The music of Heavens to Betsy has aged miraculously well. Riot grrrl slots perfectly into the current cultural moment, presenting women’s rage as an outlet and a healing spring. The 18 songs they performed—pulled from their first-and-only album, 1994’s Calculated, as well as their 1992 self-titled cassette and the Direction 7”—haven’t lost any of their potency, no matter how stripped-back they often feel. Despite the legacy of Tucker’s “other” band, the spark of promise still resides in “My Secret,” “Nothing Can Stop Me,” and “Axemen.”
If you listen hard enough to those songs, you can almost hear the band they could have grown into, had they not called it quits after playing a UFCW union hall more than three decades ago. It’s one of Pacific Northwest music’s great What-Ifs: “What if Corin hadn’t started Sleater-Kinney right away, and she just made more Heavens to Betsy records instead?” Of course, it was Sleater-Kinney that helped unlock the power of Tucker’s voice, a force present on Calculated, but not fully realized until the holy trinity of Corin/Carrie/Janet came together.
The Heavens to Betsy that took the Turn! Turn! Turn! stage reaped those benefits, her superhuman howl hitting like a gale-force wind on “Calculated” and “Nothing Can Stop Me.” This reunion doesn’t need to justify itself. If anything proved its purpose, it was the joy of hearing one of the Pacific Northwest’s most enduring voices reinhabiting the sound of her own youthful rage, channeled through her adult self’s unspoken rage over just how evergreen the themes of riot grrrl (misogyny, racism, sexual assault, homophobia, the fragility of abortion access) remain this long after the genre’s heyday.
Less than 12 hours after Tucker and Sawyer played their two-song “encore” (they joked that it was when they’d usually leave the stage and return once the audience begged enough) of “Baby’s Gone” and “Axemen,” the other shoe dropped: they’d be playing a handful of other shows across the country, in venues slightly bigger than the 50-ish capacity Turn! Turn! Turn! (but not by much). They’d be back in Portland, too, supporting their fellow queer punks, Team Dresch, who will be celebrating their new album release at Revolution Hall on October 28.
Heavens to Betsy is 2026’s most unlikely revival, but no matter how much it feels like a prank, this reunion is the real deal. We can only imagine how much more powerful they’ll be four months from now.
