Heavens to Betsy Announce First Tour in 32 Years

Heavens to Betsy, the Olympia punk duo that launched Corin Tucker before Sleater-Kinney, have announced a fall tour—their first in 32 years. The reunion began unceremoniously with a surprise show in Portland last night, and now extends to eleven US cities.

Formed in the early ’90s when Tucker and Tracy Sawyer were school friends in Eugene, Heavens to Betsy released a handful of singles and one album, Calculated, on Kill Rock Stars in 1994. The band split soon after, with Tucker going on to co-found Sleater-Kinney, while Sawyer stepped away from music. Their brief catalog remained a raw document of feminist punk in the Pacific Northwest underground.

The tour includes stops at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, Chicago’s Empty Bottle, and other independent rooms that suit the band’s no-frills ethos. A Durham date finds them supporting fellow queercore originators Team Dresch, reinforcing the ongoing thread between these intersecting scenes.

Three decades later, the project returns not as nostalgia but as a live reconnection with music that never softened its edges. For those who only know Tucker’s later work, this is a chance to hear where her voice first cut.