BACK in June, a photocopied, cut-and-paste flyer started popping up on telegraph poles around Portland, Oregon, promising a DIY show from a band most people assumed was long gone. No online hype, no big rollout — just paper, glue and a name: Heavens to Betsy.

It wasn’t a prank. Fans snapped up every ticket, and the pioneering feminist punk duo really did play their first gig in 32 years. Corin Tucker — later of Sleater-Kinney — and drummer Tracy Sawyer walked back on stage, with Tucker proudly admitting she made the flyer herself.

This time, the fear factor wasn’t quite the same as their very first show, 35 years ago this week in Olympia, Washington: a two-song set at the International Pop Underground Convention, on a bill that also included Fugazi, Bikini Kill and Melvins. Back then, they’d only practised a couple of times and Sawyer remembers thinking, mid-terror, “This has to be over soon.”

At the Portland reunion, Tucker, now 53, says she looked out and saw kids the same age they were when the band began — and they knew the words. Sawyer, 52, says 20-year-olds came up afterwards telling her they were learning drums by listening to Heavens to Betsy records.

Now the comeback has dates attached. Heavens to Betsy tour the US from 17 October, and their early-90s songs — tackling body image, sexual abuse, abortion, periods, worker exploitation and the demand for women to be “small” — will form the backbone of the set.

The duo are also releasing Baby’s Gone on 16 October via Kill Rock Stars: a new LP collecting a rare 1992 demo tape and two 7in EPs. The eight-song demo was recorded by Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman on a four-track checked out from Evergreen State College’s media library and originally circulated on around 100 cassettes dubbed by the band.

Tucker says returning to the material brought back the “clarity you have as a young person” — but she’s realistic about what she can physically do now, conceding she can’t deliver the same bloodcurdling teen-girl screams “in 2026 and make it through a whole show”. What she does want, though, is for the conviction to land: Heavens to Betsy, she says, never softened its anger or apologised for its “rage and revenge-seeking.”