‘Little Trouble Girl’: Kim Deal and Kim Gordon’s 30-year reunion

Posted On May 12, 2025May 12, 2025

You could call it indie rock’s equivalent to a total eclipse of the sun, a moment so rare that you forgot you’d been waiting decades for another glimpse. On March 19th, 2025, the “Kims” aligned for the first time in 30 years, and the first time ever on stage. The medium was Netflix, of all places, on comedian John Mulaney’s LA-based talk show, Everybody’s Live, and the sun and moon in question were the indie rock titans, Kim Deal and Kim Gordon.

That these two women have long occupied a similar space in the “alternative” music listener’s mind is both a compliment to each and, at times, an unfortunate consequence of an often reductive perspective on “women in rock”. Some of the comparisons, however, are unavoidable and understandable, even through a 2025 lens.

Both Deal and Gordon could be correctly described as the bassist and co-vocalist for one of the most daring and influential rock bands of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Deal was an original member of the Pixies and the lead singer on memorable tracks like ‘Gigantic’ and ‘I Bleed.’ Gordon co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981 and took the reins on classics like ‘Pacific Coast Highway’, ‘Kool Thing’, and ‘Swimsuit Issue’. Importantly, both artists also broke from those seminal bands and went on to form their own projects in the ’90s—Deal with The Breeders and Gordon with Free Kitten.

Even more recently, Deal, who is 63, and Gordon, who is 72, are each enjoying the rarest of moments for not-young women in the music industry: a flood of attention and celebration of their latest work. Deal’s first full-length solo album, Nobody Loves You More, came out last November with 4AD and was hailed as a triumph. Gordon’s second proper solo album, The Collective, was released by Matador Records a few months prior to similarly rave reviews, even earning Gordon her first two Grammy nominations—an industry acknowledgement that somehow didn’t reduce her coolness in the process.

Deal and Gordon’s recent tours and festival gigs are far from the usual late-career victory laps—dutifully playing the old hits or doing the occasional surprise duet for “fan service”. The appearance on Everybody’s Live was, instead, an electric, entrancing, and long overdue reunion of two icons of indie rock, feminism, and absolute bad-assery, performing a song they’d first recorded together in 1995 but had never played live as a duo.

A standout track from Sonic Youth’s 1995 album Washing Machine, ‘Little Trouble Girl’ was the first and only previous instance of a total Kimular phenomenon, as Deal provided guest backing vocals on the Gordon-penned song and also appeared in the accompanying music video. Later, in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, Gordon explained that ‘Little Trouble Girl’ was about “wanting to be seen for who you really are, being able to express those parts of yourself that aren’t ‘good girl’ but that are just as real and true”.

While some fans from both the Deal and Gordon camps caught word in advance of their impending duet on the talk show (each had appeared on the show as individual guests in the past), the actual sight of both Kims on stage was an unexpected mind-blower for many viewers—an odd juxtaposition of something completely new that also felt like a warm return to the natural order. Maybe the solar eclipse metaphor falls apart here because neither Kim obscured the other; quite the opposite, really.

Related Topics