Dance Hall Crashers On Their Reunion, 30 Years After Breaking the Boys’ Club

Karina Deniké has been in a lot of bands. The San Francisco singer has performed in dive bars and on festival stages. She’s toured Europe and Japan, has released solo records, and, for the past decade, she was a touring member of NOFX, bringing a crucial shot of feminine energy to their notoriously rowdy stage show.

But no project of Deniké’s inspires quite as big a reaction as the one she gets when fans realize she’s Karina from Dance Hall Crashers. Their eyes widen, or they wax poetic about the set list from a show they saw at Slim’s in 1996. Mostly, they want her to know just how much the women-led Berkeley ska-punk band meant to them when they were young — and how much they still mean now.

No matter that Dance Hall Crashers, a group Deniké began fronting at age 18 alongside singer Elyse Rogers, haven’t played a show in more than 20 years.

“On tour with NOFX, everywhere I went, people were coming out of the woodwork to tell me they were fans,” says Deniké in a recent Zoom interview with Dance Hall Crashers guitarist Jason Hammon. Sometimes, these fans were too young to have ever seen a DHC show. “So I’ve been feeding that back to the rest of the band. Like, you guys, this is not just a couple people. There is a lot of interest.”

Those superfans will see a long-held dream come true this month, as Dance Hall Crashers reunite for a short run of live shows, including Warped Tour dates in Long Beach and Washington, D.C. this summer, and a Riot Fest appearance in Chicago in September. Of course, they had to do something for the hometown fans: They kick it all off with two sold-out appearances at Great American Music Hall June 6 and 7.

Fittingly, the reunion was largely inspired by a certain group of young adults who never saw DHC play the first time around: the band members’ children. Among them are Logan Hammon, Jason’s daughter, who also fronts the Oakland indie rock band Small Crush; they open for Dance Hall Crashers on June 7.

“We’ve been joking about it for like 10 years: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Dance Hall Crashers got back together and we got to play with you guys?’” says Hammon. “So yeah, this is the coolest thing that could have ever happened.”

Crashing the boys’ club

Birthed from the primordial, massively influential punk soup that was 924 Gilman in the late ’80s, Dance Hall Crashers come with a particularly complex family tree: Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman were two of the band’s founding members, during a time after their seminal ska band Operation Ivy broke up, but before they formed Rancid. Hammon, a kid from San Leandro who was playing in multiple punk bands around the East Bay, joined soon after on guitar.

Elyse Rogers, a UC Berkeley student and Operation Ivy fan from Orange County, became one of the band’s singers. She was followed by Denike, a Berkeley High alum by way of Cambridge, England, who fit right in. “I was already a rude girl at age 12, because there’s such a big Caribbean and West Indian community [in England], so much reggae and ska influence,” says Denike.

By 1994, the lineup had solidified with Rogers, Deniké, Hammon, Mikey Weiss on bass and Jason’s brother Gavin Hammon on drums. The band spent the next decade making upbeat, danceable, ineffably sassy songs that hit at the intersection of punk, pop and ska. They had catchy guitar riffs, a killer live show and a key feature that set them apart from the era’s dude-heavy pack: Two charismatic, no-bullshit frontwomen who harmonized like they were spinning gold.

This was more of an anomaly than young fans in 2025 may realize.

“I think I can count on one hand the number of bands that had female singers that played Gilman frequently around that time,” says Hammon. (Spitboy, Blatz and Tilt come to mind.) That gender imbalance took on an even more bro-ish tone on Warped Tour, which DHC last played in 1996. The scene at the time, Hammon says, was “kind of a boys’ club.”

“It absolutely was,” interjects Deniké. She and Rogers quickly grew thick skin as performers, she says, but their roles as the rare frontwomen in a male-dominated scene also gave them a sense of responsibility to young women fans.

“We wanted to have an environment [at shows] where we would have felt safe being in the crowd,” she says. “And I remember wanting to present this very strong, playful and fun female front with Elyse, but I was also conscious that I didn’t want to be overly sexy. It was always about the music, and it was very, very important to me that we would get respected for our musicality, or for our stage show, but not just, you know, putting on a short skirt.”

The band stayed active off and on until 2004. During that time they released four studio albums, an EP and a live record; flirted with mainstream America via MTV rotation, song placements on the Angus soundtrack and Dawson’s Creek; and toured the country relentlessly, both headlining and opening for bands like Blink 182, No Doubt, Bad Religion and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

In 1997, Honey, I’m Homely!, their second LP to be released through MCA Records, became their most commercially successful record to date. The single “Lost Again” got significant alt-rock radio play and a music video, and the album hit No. 22 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. At least one critic compared Deniké and Rogers’ vocal dynamic to Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52s.

Still, DHC never quite crossed the rubicon into mainstream pop culture. Looking back, members cite their lack of careerism; the band consistently rejected offers and opportunities that didn’t feel like them. They also made decisions democratically. “Maybe if we didn’t all have vetoes, we would have done Sprite commercials,” says Hammon. “But we kept each other pretty honest.”

Instead, they watched bands that had opened for Dance Hall Crashers book stadium tours, fueled in part by the gold rush around Bay Area punk and ska that followed Green Day’s breakout success. It was a weird couple of years: they had signed to a major label, and in the Bay, the vitriol around “selling out” hit a fever pitch. At the same time, the national market seemed to have room for only one woman-fronted ska-rock band.

The band didn’t exactly play ball with the label either: “There were all these suggestions getting thrown at us, like, ‘Why don’t you do a cover of some big pop song from the ’80s or the ’60s, and they’ll put that on the radio, and then we’ll start pumping your originals?’ That was the thing at the time,” says Deniké. “And we were just like, ‘We don’t want to do that.’”

They also didn’t want to keep touring after it stopped being fun. And that’s the short version of what happened in 2004: Some band members wanted to go to college, some had small children; most everyone had spent their whole 20s on the road, with other projects they wanted to pursue.

So Dance Hall Crashers went on indefinite hiatus. Everyone’s remained good friends and in regular touch over the years. But half the band doesn’t live in the Bay Area anymore, and everyone has busy lives. They had no reason to believe that hiatus wouldn’t be permanent.

‘If we sound like shit, we’re not going to do this’

In November of last year, after Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman asked if Dance Hall Crashers would reunite for this year’s festival dates, Deniké and Rogers got together to sing. It was a couple weeks after the election, and moods were strange, to say the least. But the old friends needed to see how their voices sounded together before they agreed to perform.

“It’s a very strange experience to go back after this many years, because it’s all muscle memory,” says Denike. “You’ll be like, ‘I have no memory of writing this, singing this, thinking this,’ but you’re singing it, and you don’t even know where the words are coming from. And ‘Oh, my voice goes up here, and you go down there.’ We snapped back to our parts pretty quickly.”

The ’90s band-reunion economy has boomed in recent years, with nostalgia-driven festivals like When We Were Young targeting punk and emo fans now in their 40s and 50s. But for Dance Hall Crashers fans, this reunion feels especially affirming: there’s a sense of DHC as an underdog, a gem that never quite got its true shine. “It is kind of exciting to get a second chance,” says Deniké, “and to be coming from a different perspective, which is age.”

For Hammon, gearing up for shows helped him realize just how many people still carry a torch for the band. Sure, he knew the Descendents were big fans, and NOFX’s Fat Mike had remarked to him in recent years that DHC was “so beloved.”

But Hammon wasn’t sure what to expect ticket sales-wise — until the San Francisco shows sold out within five minutes. On social media, fans have spent the last six months collectively losing their minds, with some flying in from as far as Japan, Australia, England and Nova Scotia.

“It’s been really, really cool to see how excited people are. It’s cool that anybody even still listens to us,” says Hammon. “But, you know, music’s forever.”

Dance Hall Crashers play two very sold-out shows Friday and Saturday, June 6 and 7, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Details here.