Thus spoke Butt-Head: “Whoa. Girls. Whoa! These chicks rock.”

Babes in Toyland’s “Bruise Violet” echoes across the MTV airwaves, as teenage cartoon delinquents Beavis and Butt-Head headbang and air guitar to the song’s music video. “Is that Cindy Brady?” Beavis jokes, taking in frontwoman Kat Bjelland’s whipped platinum blonde hair, white babydoll dress, bright red lipstick, and piercing blue eyes. “Shut up, Beavis, these chicks are cool,” replies Butt-Head. The pair watches for a rare few moments of silence as footage of the Minneapolis three-piece thrashing their way through a set at CBGB alternates with scenes of Bjelland encountering a series of identically dressed doppelgängers. She strangles one of them, played by the renowned photographer Cindy Sherman. (Sherman’s photo of a creepy baby doll adorns the cover of Fontanelle, the album on which “Bruise Violet” appears.)

As Bjelland snarls the song’s refrain of “Liar! Liar! Liar!,” Beavis, mishearing, begins chanting, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” (An exasperated Butt-Head says, “Shut up, assmunch. She said ‘Liar.’”) Beavis continues his “Fire! Fire! Fire!” chant with every chorus, until Butt-Head intervenes: “Don’t make me kick your ass again, Beavis. We’re missing this video, and it doesn’t even suck.”

It was the summer of 1993, and Beavis and Butt-Head was the most popular show on MTV. The animated hooligans were, arguably, the most influential rock critics in America. If an up-and-coming artist’s video made it through their gauntlet of juvenile insults unscathed, a career would be jump-started. Just ask Rob Zombie.

Indeed, the Beavis and Butt-Head endorsement was the apex of Babes in Toyland’s short-lived commercial success. Fontanelle, their major label debut, had been released in August 1992. Despite reams of positive press, and the rising tide of next-Nirvana mania, the album had only sold around 50,000 copies by the start of 1993—a respectable number, but hardly enough to justify the amount of promotional resources Warner/Reprise had been spending on the band. But between the Beavis rave and a booking on the generation-defining Lollapalooza tour, things were looking up for Bjelland, drummer Lori Barbero, and bassist Maureen Herman. The label serviced a “Babes and Beavis and Butt-Head in Toyland” version of “Bruise Violet” to radio and Herman appeared on the Lollapalooza ’93 cover of Entertainment Weekly. Sales began to climb; Fontanelle would go on to sell over 200,000 copies.

In October 1993, a five-year-old boy in Ohio burned down the mobile home his family lived in, killing his younger sister. His mother claimed that Beavis and Butt-Head’s pyromaniac tendencies had inspired her son to play with matches. Almost immediately, MTV altered any episodes that referenced fire, including the one featuring “Bruise Violet.” The Babes video was replaced by a Butthole Surfers video for all subsequent re-airings. Even now, clips of the original version can only be found in obscure corners of the obsessive fan internet.

Babes in Toyland themselves have also nearly faded away, beloved by those few of us who treasure the feral beauty of their discography and revere their pioneering status as inspiration to the riot grrrl movement. To most rock fans, however, they’re little more than a footnote, if they’re known at all.

–

The hallmark of the Babes in Toyland aesthetic was the chiaroscuro of the good little girl and the big, bad witch. Their videos, album art, and merch design were full of dismembered dolls; their song titles alluded to childhood cruelties and fairytale violence. And Beavis wasn’t totally wrong: With her blonde waves, frilly dresses, and prom queen makeup, Kat Bjelland didn’t not look like the youngest Brady Bunch daughter. But the gates of hell would open when she parted those ruby-red lips. Bjelland’s voice was one of the most formidable instruments of the 1990s, equally capable of operatic leaps, terrifying shrieks, satanic babbling, and gentle coos, often within the same verse.

Kat Bjelland got good at cultivating the creatively fertile coexistence of her angels and demons at a young age. Abandoned by her biological mother as a small child, she was raised in rural Oregon by an abusive stepmother and complicit stepfather. “I was locked into my room all the time,” she told Liz Evans in the 1994 book Women, Sex and Rock’n’Roll: In Their Own Words. “I’m pretty sure being grounded and locked up has a lot to do with the way my imagination developed.” By day, “Kathy” Bjelland was a popular cheerleader who got good grades. By night, “I’d sit in this big overstuffed chair and listen to Billie Holiday, read Sylvia Plath, drink Kahlúa from my dad’s liquor cabinet, and fantasize how I was going to get the fuck out of here,” she told Neal Karlan in his book Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band. (A sign of how high the music industry had set its expectations for Babes in Toyland in the mid-’90s: Random House published a 300-page biography of them in 1994.)

As fate would have it, Bjelland’s metalhead high school boyfriend left his guitar in her basement. At 19, she joined her uncle’s surf-rock band, the Neurotics, then formed her own band, the Venarays, and moved to Portland in 1982. One night in 1984, at the Portland punk club Satyricon, Bjelland met an ambitious scenester named Courtney Love. They bonded over music and drugs, and Love begged Bjelland to be in a band with her. “When I met her, she was really cool and energetic and vibrant, and we were really close from then on,” Bjelland told Evans in 1994. “It was like finding a soulmate, a sister-type person.” “The best thing that ever happened to me, in a way, was Kat,” Love told VH1’s Behind the Music in 2010.

The relationship between Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love was so mythologized by the music press in the ’90s that it’s difficult to discern fact and fiction. As is to be expected from a “soulmate, sister-type” connection between two brilliant, creative, competitive women with traumatic childhoods and addiction issues, the pair fought as bitterly as they bonded. They traded lyrics and dresses and insults in the press. One point of contention, likely overblown in the name of marketing, was the battle over their shared aesthetic, unfortunately dubbed “kinderwhore.” We’ll probably never definitively know if it was Bjelland or Love who first dyed her hair white-blonde, donned a vintage babydoll dress, and picked up a Rickenbacker guitar to create one of the most iconic looks of the 1990s. But given Love’s fame, there’s no doubt who history most associates with the image.

Soon after they met in 1984, Bjelland and Love began playing music and working together at Portland’s strip clubs. They moved to San Francisco and started a band called, at various points, Sugar Babydoll, Sugar Babylon, and Pagan Babies, which also included future L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. In 1987, when Love left San Francisco to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles, Bjelland headed for Minneapolis, lured by the scene that had nurtured the likes of the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.

Bjelland first encountered Lori Barbero from afar, admiring her sense of rhythm as she watched her dance at punk clubs. Barbero was enmeshed in the Twin Cities scene, working at the notorious bar the Longhorn, managing the band Run Westy Run, and letting every touring artist under the sun crash on her floor. She had barely played the drums before Bjelland asked to jam, and taught herself by drumming alongside Bjelland’s riffs. Barbero developed a style mostly played using the butt-end of her drumsticks, a primal, steady thump that acted as an earthbound foil to Bjelland’s sky-scraping vocals and alien riffs.

The pair formed Babes in Toyland in 1987 with singer Cindy Russell and bassist Chris Holetz. That lineup lasted less than a year before Bjelland took the reins as frontwoman. Following a disastrous, aborted reunion with Courtney Love (accounts vary on whether she was ever actually a member of Babes in Toyland, but everyone agrees it ended badly), Bjelland and Barbero recruited 19-year-old novice musician Michelle Leon as their bass player.

In 1989, the trio signed with the Twin Cities indie powerhouse Twin/Tone, known for launching the Replacements and Soul Asylum, and released their debut album, Spanking Machine, in Spring of 1990. It’s a whirlwind of no wave dissonance, shockabilly riffs, and Bjelland’s snarling surrealism, gesturing at topics like eating disorders (“Fork Down Throat”), jealousy (“He’s My Thing”), and abandonment (“Pain in My Heart”). Barbero sang one song, the bluesy lament “Dogg.”

The band hit the road hard, building up a following in the U.S. and Europe through their unhinged live sets. Bjelland was known for using a knife as a slide and beating herself up with her guitar. “Sometimes my voice scares me when I’m playing live because I lose myself and I don’t know what’s going on,” she admitted to Liz Evans in Women, Sex and Rock’n’Roll. “It’s scream therapy. If you let it all out, you feel better,” she told Simon Reynolds in The New York Times in 1992.

Spanking Machine also garnered the band fans in high places in the indie world. The influential British DJ John Peel named the album his favorite of 1990, and Babes would go on to record four different live Peel Sessions between 1990 and 1992. Sonic Youth tapped Babes to open their European Goo tour in September 1990. While in London on that tour, the band recorded their second album. As bassist Michelle Leon wrote in her 2016 memoir I Live Inside: “Shortly after we arrive [in London], Kat finds out that her birth mother died of pancreatic cancer. She doesn’t cry, at least not in front of us, saying she already did that. She stays in her room and writes.” They titled the album To Mother.

On May 19, 1990, Warner Bros. A&R rep Tim Carr happened upon a late-night Babes in Toyland set at the Pyramid Club in Manhattan. Carr was well-respected in the music industry, having successfully guided the careers of Megadeth and Beastie Boys, among others. He was blown away. “I want music that makes me believe in god, in love, in passion,” Carr wrote in his journal at the time (as quoted in Karlen’s 1994 book.) “The closest I get is hearing the Babes purposefully play a lot of things wrong, on purpose.”

Carr spent a year courting the band, finally signing them to the Warner imprint Reprise in June 1991, just before the release of To Mother, their final Twin/Tone album. By most accounts, Babes in Toyland were one of the few ’90s bands who didn’t feel stifled by the major label system. Their contract gave them complete creative control of their sound and image, and Carr’s enthusiasm rallied the label’s sizable promotional resources. Decades later, Barbero has continued to refer to Carr as “the fourth member of Babes in Toyland.” (Carr was found dead in Thailand in 2013, stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances.)

Before Babes began recording their major label debut, the band returned to Europe to tour in support of To Mother. Their set at the Reading Festival is immortalized in Dave Markey’s 1992 documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke, where they shared a bill with their friends in Sonic Youth and Nirvana. Nevermind came out one month later, and in the fall of 1991, everything changed—not only due to Nevermind’s unprecedented commercial success, but also because Kurt Cobain had started dating Courtney Love.

As Bjelland and Babes in Toyland’s stars had risen over the years, so had Love’s. She formed the band Hole in 1989; their debut single, 1990’s “Retard Girl,” features a cover photo of Bjelland hanging upside down on a tree branch. Their September 1991 debut album, Pretty on the Inside, co-produced by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, bears a close aesthetic kinship with Spanking Machine and To Mother. From the similarly abrasive sonics and shared lyrical themes of corrupted girlhood down to the nearly identical handwriting in the album art, it was hard to deny that the two women continued to draw from the same well. This was irresistible to the press, who lumped the bands together in countless “women in rock” trend pieces. By the time Love married Cobain in February 1992, then gave birth to the couple’s child in August, she had become a tabloid staple, and Bjelland a mere talking head in her story.

“There’s not much to say, really. I like playing music and she likes being famous,” Bjelland shrugged during the 2003 episode of E! True Hollywood Story devoted to Courtney Love.

–

In November 1991, Babes in Toyland convened in Minneapolis to record demos for their first major label album. Like Hole, Babes had enlisted a member of Sonic Youth to produce their album: guitarist Lee Ranaldo. The plan was to return to Europe in December for a tour, then head into the studio with Ranaldo in February 1992. Barbero picked the album name before recording began: A fontanelle is the soft spot on an infant’s head where the plates of the skull haven’t completely fused together yet. Fontanelles exist so that the baby’s head can fit through the birth canal. And what a tortured birth this album would have.

On December 19, 1991, Henry Rollins, the frontman of Black Flag and Rollins Band, and his best friend and roommate, Joe Cole, were walking home from a grocery store to their apartment in Los Angeles. It was late at night; they had been at a Hole show at the Whisky-A-Go-Go. Cole was a roadie for both Black Flag and Hole. He was also the boyfriend of Babes in Toyland bassist Michelle Leon. Rollins and Cole were robbed at gunpoint, and Cole was shot dead. (The murder remains unsolved.)

Devastated and furious that the band’s punishing schedule wouldn’t allow her space to grieve, Leon quit in February 1992. Babes in Toyland were scheduled to start recording that month, and they had no bass player. Fortuitously, sessions for Sonic Youth’s album Dirty went longer than anticipated, tying up Ranaldo for another two months. (Dirty ended up including two songs about Cole’s death, “100%” and “JC.”) The recording was pushed to April.

Rather than hiring a pro bassist with serious chops, Barbero and Bjelland went by instinct. They enlisted their Chicago-based friend Maureen Herman, inexperienced but willing to jump right in. (Herman’s roommate, Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, taught her the basslines for Babes’ entire back catalog the night before her audition.) Five weeks after Herman joined the band, the Fontanelle sessions began.

Unsurprisingly, making the jump from the shoestring recordings of their first two albums to big-budget major label sessions wasn’t exactly easy, especially with a brand-new bass player learning how to fit her own style into songs already recorded as demos. Ranaldo, who had been informed of Herman’s arrival very late in the process, likened the switch-up to “a car that’s going 80 miles an hour come screeching to a halt and starts creeping along at like 2 miles an hour,” in an interview with Selena Chambers for her Fontanelle 33 ⅓ series book. It couldn’t have helped that this was his first time producing another band’s major label album, either.

The recording began with a week at Sorcerer Sound in New York before moving to Pachyderm in remote Cannon Falls, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis. (Barbero would later recommend Pachyderm to her friends in Nirvana, who would go on to make In Utero there.) The plan to record live to tape, capturing the visceral energy of Babes’ stage show, was initially scrapped, as Bjelland and Barbero still needed to fully work out their chemistry with Herman. But isolating each instrument and recording separately was even harder. There was also the distracting presence of Bjelland’s new boyfriend, Stuart “Spasm” Gray of the Australian band Lubricated Goat. (The pair would marry in the summer of 1992 and divorce in 1994.) Once recording was complete, Bjelland and Ranaldo clashed over the album’s mixes, and at the last minute Bjelland brought in Skinny Puppy’s Dave Ogilvie to finish the job.

Given the circumstances, it’s a miracle that Fontanelle even exists, let alone sounds as good as it does. The album exhibits no symptoms of “selling out”; if anything, the heightened studio sheen only makes the band sound more terrifying than on the previous records. As The Los Angeles Times’ Jonathan Gold put it in a review, “This may be the rawest performance ever released by a major label, and also one of the most necessary.”

Fontanelle charges out of the gate with its lead single, “Bruise Violet,” a scorching diss track that is almost definitely about Courtney Love, though Bjelland has never explicitly admitted it. “You see the stars through eyes lit up with lies/You got your stories all twisted up in mine,” Bjelland screeches. “You fucking bitch/Well I hope your insides rot.” “Right Now,” with its bassline as sticky as tar, drags the listener down into the gaping mouth of hell, as Bjelland mumbles catatonically about “mother dying all of the time” and being “too scared to sleep because of the creep.” “Bluebell” gallops at a breakneck pace until stopping dead in its tracks for Bjelland to scream at the top of her lungs, “YOU’RE DEAD MEAT, MOTHERFUCKER! YOU DON’T TRY TO RAPE A GODDESS!”

Bjelland told NME in 1992, “Most of our songs are about people fucking around. Lying to you, not being honest. Relationships.”

“Handsome and Gretel” features the album’s most conventional alt-rock riff, but thrillingly torpedoes any chances of radio play with gleeful schoolyard taunts like, “My name is Gretel, yeah/I’ve got a crotch that talks/It talks to all the cocks/It’s been 12 city blocks, you fucking bitch.” “Blood” races like an adrenaline-spiked heart rate. “Magick Flute,” sung by Barbero in a bluesy wail, would be a relatively straightforward torch song, if not for lines like “Kick Tom upside his head” and “Lactating eyes looking from my thighs/Seeing and wondering what went wrong.”

“Short Song” and “Jungle Train” are Fontanelle’s dark, bloody heart, the ultimate showcases for Bjelland’s vocal pyrotechnics. “Short Song” is exactly that: 40 seconds of grunting, retching, moaning, incoherent yelling, and “hoo-ah!”s that sound like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Anyone who has ever been so angry that words just won’t come will completely understand this song. “Jungle Train” mostly consists of Bjelland repeating the phrase “rip, strike” in various animalistic states (tiger growls, monkey howls, orgasmic sighs) over stumbling beats and divebombing bass. It also contains one of the highest shrieks ever committed to tape. Bjelland told NME in 1992 that “Jungle Train” was improvised in the studio. “It’s like musical weather,” she said. “It sounds just like weather with all that screaming.”

If Fontanelle had ended there, it would have already cemented its status as one of the most brutal albums of the decade. But there are still four songs of twisted nursery rhymes, menacing wordplay, and frantic bloodletting to go. The closer, “Gone,” features just Bjelland’s voice and guitar, accompanied by a recording of her screaming her head off while breaking bottles against the walls of Pachyderm Studio. Bjelland is at her most melodic and calm as she sings, “Now I live with nothing to give/’Cause it’s gone.” She sounds completely broken.

“It should sound like nothing that you’ve heard before. That’s my intention,” Bjelland said of Fontanelle in a 1992 Los Angeles Times piece. “Like my singing, all I try to do is I just push myself into things where I think I can’t reach notes and stuff. Sometimes it sounds really ridiculous, but then you just kind of work on it. I always like experimental stuff. Some people aspire to, like, being comfortable and mediocre. That’s good if they can be relaxed in their minds with that. But it seems like to get peace of mind for me, I have to go into the most extreme situations and then come back.”

—

In June 1993, 10 months after Fontanelle, the Painkillers EP, comprised of outtakes and a live concert recording, was released to coincide with Babes in Toyland’s Lollapalooza dates. That tour marked the end of Babes’ golden era. The band splintered—Barbero remained in Minneapolis, while Herman moved back to Chicago and Bjelland moved to Seattle. In Seattle, Bjelland reconnected with her old frenemy Courtney Love. In a 2024 interview, Love tearfully recalled that Bjelland was the first person she called when Kurt Cobain killed himself in April 1994, and Bjelland was by Love’s side passing out Cobain’s clothes to fans at a Seattle vigil days after his death. Bjelland also has a co-writing credit on Hole’s song “I Think That I Would Die,” from their 1994 album Live Through This.

Babes in Toyland released one more album, 1995’s Nemesisters, that came close to reaching Fontanelle’s heights in its first half, before devolving into a series of head-scratching covers. (Did we seriously need a cheery, straightforward version of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by Babes in Toyland?) Herman was unceremoniously let go from the band in 1996 during the Nemesisters tour. As she told LA Weekly in 2015, she was unable to play due to a dislocated hip, and “found out they had someone come in and use my equipment and practice to replace me.” (In a 2020 interview, Barbero scoffed, “Maureen said that she had to quit because her hip deteriorated and she doesn’t have a hip anymore. But last time I saw her, she was walking. She had a hip.”)

Bjelland and Barbero hobbled along on and off with a rotating cast of bass players—including a brief reunion with Leon—before fully calling it quits in 2001. They reunited in 2015 for a tour that also initially included Herman, before she was once again kicked out of the band under a cloud of animosity. Bjelland and Barbero continued playing with a new bassist until their final show in 2017.

There are no happy endings in Babes in Toyland songs, and the Babes in Toyland story does not have a happy ending. When asked on Conan Neutron’s podcast in 2020 why the band broke up in 2017, Barbero replied, “Quite honestly, Kat is an addict and she is not a functioning addict anymore.” Bjelland has no public-facing social media accounts, and she hasn’t performed live or given an interview in the past eight years.

In the fall of 1990, Babes in Toyland played a show in the woods near Olympia, Washington. In attendance were local college kids Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, and Kathi Wilcox. In her 2024 memoir Rebel Girl, Hanna recalls, “I had just seen the most important band in the world. All I wanted was to be near them. They were everything. I’d seen God and she was three women playing songs in a shack in the middle of nowhere…I felt like Kat Bjelland’s poetic lyrics and the tones she made with her voice reflected my life situation back to me in a way no one else could.” Shortly after the Olympia show, Hanna, Vail, and Wilcox formed Bikini Kill.

In 2010, Hanna talked with The Fader about the importance of keeping an archive. “In the ’90s, Babes in Toyland was a band that was hugely important to us and we were like, ‘God if only we could play awesome shows like Babes in Toyland.’ And now, you know, I meet girls who have no idea who they are. And I watch them be erased.”