“[At the beginning of riot grrrl,] there was some idea that we were playing our instruments badly on purpose,” Tobi said. “But we weren’t. We swapped instruments on stage — playing the ones we weren’t the best at — to show the process of learning. Because you didn’t see it,” she said, noting the lack of opportunity and support for women musicians, then and now. “You don’t really have to be good at an instrument to write a good song,” Kathleen agreed when she returned to the mic, and ended their main set with an ecstatic performance of Rebel Girl — a totemic (and undoubtedly their most famous) song about the cliché of female bitchiness that is an ode to sisterhood, solidarity and love.

Read “bikini kill’s 90s feminist punk is still radical and urgent in 2019” on i-D.