Heavens to Betsy collect a lost 1992 demo on the album baby's gone

Heavens to Betsy are opening their archive. Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer have announced baby's gone, a 16-track collection that gathers a previously unheard 1992 demo with the band's 1993 and 1994 7-inch recordings, and Kill Rock Stars releases it on October 16.

The demo at the centre of it was recorded in February 1992 by Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, who has written liner notes for the release. SPIN reported that the original cassette was recently rediscovered, digitized and prepared for release alongside the 1993 These Monsters Are Real and 1994 Direction recordings. A limited edition of the demo cassette itself, with recreated artwork, is planned.

The first song out is "ain't never goin' back", an unheard lo-fi track that SPIN said catches Tucker and Sawyer finding their feet in the artistic community around Olympia, Washington in the early 1990s.

All of it follows a reunion. Tucker, who went on to Sleater-Kinney, and Sawyer, who played in the Husbands, the Flying Tigers and the Lies, played their first Heavens to Betsy concert in more than 30 years this summer.

The tour opens the same day the record does, October 16 at the Fine Line in Minneapolis, and runs to November 22 at Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina. Two nights at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco follow the opener, then Revolution Hall in Portland on October 28, the Black Cat in Washington on October 30 and the Bowery Ballroom in New York on Halloween.

November takes in the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia on the 1st, Nuemos in Seattle on the 5th, the Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena on the 8th, two nights at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on the 14th and 15th and the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia on the 21st.

The dates are on the tour guide and baby's gone sits on the release calendar among the autumn's rock reissues, near Republica's 30th anniversary edition with a 1997 live set attached and the vinyl anthology of the cassette zine Tellus.

SPIN placed the band's start at Evergreen State College, where Tucker was a student when she formed the group with her childhood friend Sawyer and the two bluffed their way onto a bill in 1991. The magazine pointed to "Axemen", from 1994's Calculated, as the song that condensed the movement's confrontational streak into a response to the privileged suburban world around them.

What those songs were about is why the pair went back to them. The material took on rape culture, body shaming and the politics of gender while making room for queerness, friendship and collective strength, and the band now sees the subjects as more current than they were. "I wasn't sure if I would ever revisit heavens to betsy," Sawyer told SPIN, saying that talking it over and feeling how relevant the subjects still are settled the question.

Tucker credits Neuman with catching the band at the right moment. She described her as a leader who understood that young women needed the tools to express themselves, and who simply checked a Tascam out of Evergreen's AV library and recorded them. Sawyer said reconnecting as adults and mothers had been good, and that once they started playing again it was "like muscle memory".