Kathleen Hanna has achieved a great deal of success with the feminist electropunk band Le Tigre—so much so that the band’s accomplishments have overshadowed her two previous claims to fame, leading riot-grrl pioneers Bikini Kill and being assaulted by Courtney Love. When “Deceptacon” hit the dance floors near the end of 1999, it was a revelation. Leave it to an Olympia ex-pat and the godmother of riot grrl to give the world a political revolution Emma Goldman would be proud of. Because Le Tigre’s debut album was, in fact, political and dancefloor dynamite, and its energy and spirit seemed to appear out of nowhere, fully formed and polished.

But the Le Tigre template wasn’t created overnight. In fact, originally Le Tigre wasn’t supposed to be Le Tigre; when Hanna started collaborating with Johanna Fateman, the idea was to put together a backing band for Hanna’s solo project and alter ego, Julie Ruin. Conceived and produced in the year between Bikini Kill’s dissolution and Le Tigre’s formation, Julie Ruin was an experiment for Hanna: take the punk ethos and the anarchic sound of Bikini Kill, but replace the guitars with a sampler and old keyboards. Recorded mostly in her bedroom and produced on her own, Julie Ruin is not just a great set of songs, but also a fruitful new direction Hanna would carry into Le Tigre, minus the four-track production. If you want an idea of where “My My Metrocard” and “Well Well Well” came from, look no further than Ms. Ruin, Valley Girl Intelligentsia.