Every few years, riot grrrl gets rediscovered. Not by the people who were there, not by the writers who covered it in the early 1990s, but by a new audience that finds it through a documentary, a memoir, a streaming playlist, a band that lists Bikini Kill in their influences. And every time it happens, the question gets asked again: why does this music feel so alive? Why does something made in basements and community centers in Olympia, Washington three decades ago still land with the force of something recorded last week?

The obvious answer is that the conditions that produced riot grrrl never went away. The anger that Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail and Allison Wolfe and Corin Tucker and their collaborators and peers channeled into those recordings was anger about specific things: the treatment of women in punk spaces, in music scenes, in daily life. The solution those musicians proposed was not to be more polite about it. The solution was to make the anger audible, to put it in the room, to take up space with it and refuse to apologize.

That approach was not subtle. “Rebel Girl” is not a subtle song. “Suck My Left One” is not a subtle song. The genius of riot grrrl was understanding that subtlety was exactly what the culture was already demanding from women who were upset about something, and that meeting that demand was itself a form of capitulation. To be loud was the point. To be direct was the point. To play badly on purpose, at least sometimes, and still take up the microphone was the point.

The movement had a short, intense run as a self-identified scene. By the mid-1990s, it had fragmented, partly under the weight of mainstream press attention that the participants themselves often rejected, partly because the artists involved moved in different directions. Hanna formed Le Tigre. Tucker and Wolfe reformed Sleater-Kinney with Janet Weiss. The music kept going. The label “riot grrrl” mostly didn’t.

What survived, and what keeps getting rediscovered, is the logic of it. The idea that women making aggressive, political, deliberately confrontational music in a scene that had not historically made space for them was not just a genre experiment but a framework. That framework turns out to be reusable. Every generation of young women and non-binary artists who feel locked out of something and decide to make their own version of it is, whether they know it or not, working from a blueprint that was laid down in Olympia in 1991.

You can hear it in Lambrini Girls, the UK duo who made their debut this year with a record that sounds like it was recorded in a fury and released before anyone could talk them out of it. You can hear it in the harder end of the hyperpop world, in music that uses aggression and volume as a kind of self-defense. You can hear it in the survival of bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill themselves, both of whom continue to perform to audiences that include people who weren’t born when those first records came out.

Bikini Kill are playing Bumbershoot in Seattle this September, which has a certain symmetry to it. They are playing a festival in the region where they formed, on a bill that includes artists who were substantially influenced by what they built. Kathleen Hanna has written a memoir. The material is being taught in universities. The songs are in playlists next to music made this year.

None of this should diminish what riot grrrl was, which was a specific response to a specific moment. But the fact that the specific response keeps finding new audiences suggests something about the durability of the moment, which is to say, the durability of the problem. The anger doesn’t date because the conditions that produced it haven’t gone away. The music stays alive because the fight isn’t over.

That’s not a triumphant note to end on, exactly. But it is an honest one. Riot grrrl at 35 is not a museum exhibit. It is still a set of working tools. The people who keep picking them up are not being nostalgic. They are being practical.