Bird On The Wire

Le Tigre will be playing three UK shows including:

3rd Jun – Troxy (London)
5th Jun – Albert Hall (Manchester)
6th Jun – Barrowland Ballroom (Glasgow)

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LE TIGRE (Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman) formed as an obstinately hopeful, even joyous, post-riot grrrl project in New York City in 1999—when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and regressive hipster irony (à la VICE Magazine) ruled. Abandoning traditional punk instrumentation, the band paired drum-machine beats and looped 8-bit samples with the simplest, serrated guitar riffs and call-and-response vocals to write the songs on their first, self-titled album. Released late that year, they conceived of it as music “for the party after the protest.”

Though rage had its place in Le Tigre, the band, with celebratory songs such as “Hot Topic”—a shout-out to queer and feminist artistic inspirations (from David Wojnarowicz and Lorraine O’Grady to Catherine Opie and Vaginal Davis)—was a departure for Kathleen; she was best known as the singer of Bikini Kill, whose fans found feminist catharsis in her scorching vocals. “Deceptacon,” the lead track of Le Tigre’s debut, was perhaps an aesthetic bridge between that seductive register of rage and her new band’s dancefloor ambitions. As the critic Sasha Geffen wrote, reflecting in 2019 on the endurance of the song as an underground club classic and radical rallying cry, “Le Tigre’s strategy of layering fierce punk vocals over electronic whimsy crystallized into what came to be known as electroclash, a brief but bright-burning aughts microgenre that cleared open space for groundbreaking artists like Alice Glass and Grimes.”

+ Dream Wife