L7

Los Angeles, 1985

L7 began in Los Angeles in 1985 as a two-guitar partnership between Donita Sparks, who sang and played guitar, and Suzi Gardner, who did much the same. The rhythm section took several years to settle. Roy Koutsky drummed from 1986 to 1988 and Anne Anderson from 1988 to 1989; Jennifer Finch arrived on bass in the second half of the 1980s and Demetra Plakas took the drum stool in 1989, which is the line-up most listeners mean when they say L7.

The self-titled debut came out on Epitaph in 1988, a scrappy record on a label then better known for Los Angeles hardcore than for anything that would later be filed under grunge. Sparks has described the band as an outlier from the start — too heavy for the art-punk circuit, too odd for metal radio — and the early catalogue bears that out.

Sub Pop, Slash, and the records that stuck

The turn came with Smell the Magic, released by Sub Pop in 1990, which put L7 in the middle of the Seattle label's run and gave them "Fast and Frightening". Bricks Are Heavy followed on Slash in 1992 and remains the commercial high-water mark: "Pretend We're Dead" and "Shove" both travelled well beyond the band's existing audience, and "Everglade" and "Monster" kept the album in rotation.

Hungry for Stink arrived on Slash in 1994 with "Andres" and "Fuel My Fire" — the latter later covered by the Prodigy. The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum came out in 1997 on London and Reprise after Finch's departure, with Gail Greenwood on bass from 1997 to 1999 and Janis Tanaka from 1999 to 2001. Slap-Happy, self-released through Wax Tadpole in 1999, closed out the first phase.

Two things from those years are cited at least as often as the records. In 1991 the band founded Rock for Choice, a long-running series of benefit concerts for reproductive rights, with proceeds going in part to victims of anti-abortion violence. And at Reading in 1992, during a bout of technical trouble and a crowd pelting the stage, Sparks threw a used tampon into the audience — a moment the band has spent three decades being asked about.

The split, the film, and eleven extra laps

L7 stopped in 2001 and stayed stopped for thirteen years, reconvening in December 2014. The reunion was tied to a documentary, L7: Pretend We're Dead, directed by Sarah Price and released in 2016. Sparks has been candid that the plan was modest. "When L7 decided to release a documentary in 2015, we thought maybe we would take one last victory lap around the sun by playing some shows," she said when the farewell tour was announced. "Instead, that lap turned into eleven more years of touring."

Those eleven years produced Scatter the Rats in 2019 on Blackheart, the first L7 album in twenty years, and a steady diet of festivals and club runs. The band marked its fortieth anniversary with a Los Angeles show on 3 October 2025. The farewell was announced in May 2026, framed as the first leg of a world tour rather than a single North American sweep, with further international dates promised but not yet published.

July 2026

On 13 July 2026 the band said Finch had been diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer and would not be on the tour. What had first looked treatable had moved fast; multiple surgeries followed and left her severely limited. She died on 18 July, aged 59. A fundraiser set up for her treatment reached roughly half a million dollars, much of it from other musicians.

Sparks had spoken about Finch's condition shortly before her death, saying plainly that she was not well and would not be joining the run. Finch's own instruction, relayed by the band, was that the tour should go ahead. On 10 September L7 confirmed the solution she had signed off on: Tanaka, the bassist from 1999 to 2001, returning to the job. "Although we will miss our Jennifer Finch terribly, she gave her blessing to welcome back L7's bass player Janis Tanaka to replace her," the band wrote.

A 2003 tape, finished in 2026

There is new music attached to the farewell, though not an album. On 5 October 2026 the band put out "Loma Linda", built from an unfinished recording made in 2003 with Tanaka on bass and completed this year with fresh lyrics, vocals and overdubs. It moves on a slow, heavy groove and name-checks a string of Southern Californian places — Loma Linda, Chula Vista, San Jacinto, Rancho Cucamonga.

"I was searching the band's archives and came across this unfinished track from when Janis was in the band," Sparks said. "It still sounded rather fresh and very L7." The song was given away free through the band's website for its first week before going to streaming services, and it doubles as the formal announcement of Tanaka's return.

Where the tour stands

The announced itinerary for The Last Hurrah runs from 9 October 2026 at Walter Studios in Phoenix to 14 November at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, with tickets having gone on sale on 11 May through Ticketmaster and AXS. In practice the run opened three days early, on 6 October at the Casbah in San Diego — a small club warm-up before the itinerary proper.

Earlier in the year the band played a handful of larger dates with Amyl and the Sniffers in support: Toronto and Montreal on 4 and 5 June and Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado, on 17 June, followed by the Sjock festival in Lille, Belgium, on 12 July and a bill at the Toyota Arena in Ontario, California, on 29 August. The autumn leg is theatre and club scale by comparison, taking in Texas, the south-east, Washington DC, Philadelphia on 22 October, New York on 24 October, Toronto's Danforth Music Hall on 29 October, Chicago on 1 November, then the upper Midwest, Denver, Salt Lake City, the Pacific north-west and Vancouver before the Los Angeles finish.