The ‘90s DIY feminist punk heroes of Tsunami have reunited and are playing Philly

There’s an iconic hand-drawn image from a punk rock fanzine in 1977 showing a rudimentary guitar lesson. ”This is a chord, this is another, this is a third,” it reads, followed by all-caps instructions: “NOW FORM A BAND.”

Thirteen years later, Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey embodied that DIY ethos with Tsunami, the indie band they founded in Arlington, Va., in 1990 that’s now reunited after a decades-long break and is on a tour that arrives at Underground Arts on Friday. Loud Is As, the band’s five-LP box set, was released in October by the prestigious reissue label Numero Group.

Thomson, who has lived in Philadelphia since 1998, and Toomey didn’t just start a band. They took that punk imperative further. The songwriters, guitarists, and activists also started the Simple Machines label to release their own records and those by contemporaries such as Scrawl, Lois, and Ida, with the latter joining them on “The Coin Toss Tour.” Yes, the band who opens each show is determined by an onstage coin flip.

Simple Machines became a pillar of the fertile D.C. post-punk scene that spawned labels like the Dischord label and formidable bands such as Fugazi, Bad Brains, and riot-grrrl progenitors Bikini Kill.

Thomson and Toomey also published a freely distributed Mechanics Guide that shares how-to tips on the do’s and don’ts of running a label and surviving in the indie music business.

The friends and bandmates, who sat for a Zoom interview last week in Catskill, N.Y., where Toomey lives, during a break from tour rehearsals, were feminist role models for a generation eager to strike a blow against homogenous corporate culture.

Thomson concisely declared the band’s uncompromising independence on the song “Lucky,” targeting male gatekeepers on the band’s 1993′s debut Deep End: “Girls who dare to do,” she sang. “Don’t sit around and count their lucky stars, or wait for validation from you.”

Tsunami toured the U.S. and the UK, building community as expert networkers of the pre-internet era.

“We jammed econo,” said Thomson, evoking a credo that served as a title to a documentary about the Minutemen, a classic DIY band of the era. “We would drive ourselves. Rarely would we pay for hotel rooms. It was just the cumulative effect of meeting people and becoming friends and staying in touch. We pretty much had friends in every city we went to. People were very generous.”

Toomey was an indie rock celebrity, the band’s public face. But Thomson and Toomey, who met while living in a group house of the youth activist group Positive Force, are very much a team and have always been.

“Jenny was the more visible musician, but … Kristin is like a machine. She can organize the heck out of anything. That’s why it was the success it was,” writes Rob Christiansen in the Loud Is As notes. Christiansen plays bass in the current lineup with Luther Gray on drums and Franklin Bruno on guitar and keyboards.

In 1991, Thomson met Philadelphia concert booker Bryan Dilworth at JC Dobbs on South Street, marrying him four years later. That era in Philly is glimpsed on Loud Is As, which includes answering machine messages left by fans begging Tsunami to play an all-ages show because the callers were too young get into the Khyber Pass Pub.

The box also includes Thomson’s “Old City,” which captures an era when Khyber, Upstairs at Nick’s, and Tin Angel were on the same block and a Tsunami van and trailer were stolen from the neighborhood.

Among those who paid $2 postage for the Mechanics Guide in those days was Ken Shipley, a teenage Tsunami and Ida fan who lived in the Philly area in the mid-1990s, working for the punk label Bloodlink Records and house-sitting for Slovak sculptor Koloman Sokol.

“I ordered the Mechanics Guide when I was 14 or 15 years old,” said Shipley. “They were such an important label to me because they were extremely DIY and they had their own sort of aesthetic. I grew up on the Dischord bands [which were often marked by a serious, straightedge perspective], but Tsunami was more like the goofy D.C. which made everything seem possible.”

In 2003, Shipley cofounded the Numero Group, which built a reputation unearthing obscure soul music and has recently spotlighted ‘90s punk.

“Kristin and Jenny were the blueprint for a lot of what I ended up doing,” he said, still buzzing from Coin Toss shows in Woodstock, N.Y., and Somerville, Mass., over the weekend. (Kate Pierson of the B-52s guested in Woodstock; Lord and others sat in Somerville. More special guests are expected in Philly.)

In 1998, Tsunami played a final show and shut down the label. Aside from a few early 00s one-offs, Thomson and Toomey put the band aside. In 2000, they cofounded the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit protecting musicians’ rights in the emerging digital landscape.

It was Shipley who started pestering them in the 2010s. “I’m a very persistent person,” he said. Both women were busy; Toomey was director of the Ford Foundation’s Catalyst Investment Fund, and Thomson worked with the social justice organization Media Democracy Fund and played in the Philly band Ken.

But what turned into the loving and definitive Loud Is As started to take hold. “We didn’t take it very seriously because we were working hard at our jobs,” said Toomey. “But Numero put out some reissues of our friends’ bands, and did such a good job, we become more open to it.”

Dilworth died at 51 in March 2020, leaving an enormous void in the Philly music scene. During the pandemic, their son Riley got to explore his mother’s musical past, scanning photos and fliers and press clippings for Loud Is As.

“I had a process that I later found out is what Andy Warhol would do,” said Toomey. “He had a box, and he would throw anything worth keeping in it until it was full and then close it. I did that with suitcases until I had about 20 suitcases.”

In 2023, Thompson and Toomey got Tsunami back together for a Numero festival in California. Now, they’ve stepped away from their jobs to devote six months to the band. With a laugh, Toomey said she and Thomson have been taking lessons from Philly musician and vocal coach Michael Kiley to work on their “old lady voices.”

“The hard part is that almost everybody involved has another job or some other responsibility, like children or partners. So carving out time to do this is a lot to ask everybody,” Thomson said.

“It is a weird moment politically to be coming back with everything feeling as precarious as it does,” said Toomey. “A piece of it feels frivolous. But it also feels like we’re connecting with our punk roots. We’re working those muscles again.”

An Evening with Ida and Tsunami at Underground Arts, 1200 Callowhill St., at 8:30 p.m. March 28. $29.50. UndergroundArts.org.