Le Tigre

Kathleen Hanna formed Bikini Kill, the most visible product of the early-’90s riot-grrrl movement, to disrupt the orthodoxy, juicing go-go garage rock with sarcastic drill-team choruses and enough teen spirit to inspire a nation of fanzine-writing followers. After Bikini Kill ran its course — just as the potency of the band’s pop began to match that of its agitprop — Hanna made a dark solo record as Julie Ruin, then formed Le Tigre in 1998 in New York with Johanna Fateman and experimental filmmaker Sadie Benning. The idea was updating Bikini Kill’s scrappy DIY punk rock with the tools of today’s underground: samplers, digital recording equipment, homemade dance beats, sarcastic drill-team choruses. After recording 1999’s Le Tigre and 2002’s Feminist Sweepstakes on the cheap in North Carolina, the act decided to do the bulk of the work on the next album at home in New York with three ProTools Mboxes. The result is This Island, Le Tigre’s third album, which is full of amped-up political sloganeering set atop the kind of bumptious electro-punk you’d expect from longtime alt-culture denizens grown impatient with their cohorts’ apathy.