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 El