Bikini Kill Reschedules Miami Shows for 2022, Announces Reject All American Reissue

Riot grrrl icons Bikini Kill were scheduled to take over the Ground for back-to-back concerts last fall. We all know what happened to every concert scheduled for 2020.

Luckily, you can't keep a good riot grrrl down. The band, led by Kathleen Hanna, has announced that those back-to-back Miami shows will happen — in 2022. The feminist punk band will hit the stage at the Ground on May 27-28 next year.

This is actually the second time the concert dates have been pushed back; the shows were first rescheduled for November 2021.

If you're still holding on to the tickets you purchased for either the scheduled 2020 or 2021 shows, no worries — they'll be honored on the new date. And if you just discovered that Bikini Kill is coming to Miami, you're also in luck: Tickets go on sale to the public today at 1 p.m.

For the uninitiated: Olympia, Washington-based Bikini Kill led the early-1990s riot grrrl movement, which served as a direct response to the misogyny festering in the punk and DIY scenes. Hanna, Kathi Wilcox, and Tobi Vail founded the band in 1990; Billy Karren joined a year later. While it never achieved the level of success attained by other bands from the Pacific Northwest (see: Nirvana), Bikini Kill  left a lasting cultural mark with songs like "Rebel Girl" and "I Like Fucking." The band's debut album, Pussy Whipped, released in 1993, is considered a seminal work in the feminist movement.

Record labels took notice of Bikin Kill's influence, which led to the signing of acts that weren't as aggressive and were more radio-friendly in the latter half of the '90s, when you saw songs like No Doubt's "Just a Girl" and "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks. One of the biggest albums of the decade, Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, likely wouldn't have seen the light of day had it not been for the foundation set down by Bikini Kill.

But riot grrrl's "girl power" mantra really got a pop makeover when the Spice Girls got ahold of it and became global superstars.

This misrepresentation of the riot grrrl movement by labels and the media led to Bikini Kill's breakup in 1997. Hanna later formed Le Tigre, an influential band in its own right, in 1998; the single "Deceptacon" remains a dance-floor classic to this day. Hanna and Wilcox also came together in 2010 as part of the Julie Ruin.

Bikini Kill fans had been salivating at the possibility of a reunion, and in 2019 the band delivered when it announced four shows in New York and Los Angeles. The lineup for those shows consisted of Hanna, Wilcox, Vail, and new guitarist Erica Dawn Lyle.

The band hasn't released any new material since 1996's Reject All American. (Hanna told Pitchfork in 2019 that the band didn't have plans to write new material, adding "I wouldn’t know how to write in that way anymore.") But Bikini Kill has announced that it will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Reject All American with a 500-copy blue-vinyl reissue available exclusively through Bandcamp on May 7.

Bikini Kill. Friday, May 27, and Saturday, May 28, 2022, at the Ground, 34 NE 11th St., Miami; thegroundmiami.com. Tickets cost $25 to $40 via eventbrite.com.