Though Kathy Foster has long been a Portland denizen, she’s originally from Sunnyvale. “Mountain View; Sunnyvale” she clarifies. “I went to De Anza. Sold vintage clothes at the flea market.”

That was almost two decades ago. Foster has gone on to reach a certain level of indie stardom since her days slinging old stock—as the bassist behind one of the biggest bands to come out of the Northwest in the 2000s: the Thermals.

But that’s not all she is. She’s got several other projects she keeps busy with—breezy indie-pop outfit All Girl Summer Fun Band, duo Hutch & Kathy—and another, called Hurry Up, which is coming to Homestead Lanes on Saturday.

“It just kinda started out as a joke, almost,” she says of Hurry Up’s formation, in 2011. “We were playing New York and she (Maggie) came to our show.” Hurry Up is made up of Foster, her Thermals bandmate Westin Glass, and, Maggie Vale, who worked for the Thermals’ label, Kill Rock Stars, at the time. “We were talking about how we’re always ‘the nice people.’ (And we said), ‘We should start a hardcore band!’”

Days went on, and the joke didn’t die. “We were talking about it, but as we were talking about it, we were like, ‘We should do this.’”

Three years later, and Hurry Up is no longer a joke. They’re a fully fledged band that plays shows and records albums—their self-titled debut, released this summer, is currently on Spotify. Kathy is on drums, and Glass is on guitar—the reverse of their Thermals roles.

And that’s the draw of Hurry Up—for Foster, anyway. Even rock stars can feel the squeeze of monotony, and Hurry Up allows her to let loose a little.

“The Thermals have been kind of a career for me and for us,” she says. “So when we play shows, we usually play big places.” Hurry Up is a much more casual affair. “I wanted to get back to playing small shows. I also wanted to get back to playing drums, ’cause that was my first instrument when I was 16.”

The songs are different, too: they’re definitely louder, but also, in a way, more relaxed. “All the songs that we’ve written are just kinda, like, jamming,” says Foster. “Hurry Up is a little more on-the-spot collaboration… songs that are tongue-in-cheek and whatever feels good, cathartically. It just gets real sweaty and shouty. (This is us) just going for it.”

Hurry Up play Homestead Bowl in Cupertino on Aug. 1 at 8pm.

“Most people do their punk band first and then the mellower project comes later in life,” Hutch Harris says, recalling a conversation he recently had about the natural order of a typical musical career. The Cupertino native and founding member of indie-punk trio The Thermals ended up doing things the other way around—playing in the plodding, shoegaze-y Haelah, the bopping, indie-pop group, Urban Legends, and the indie-folk two-piece Hutch and Kathy (with Thermals co-founder Kathy Foster) before turning everything up to 11.

Fortunately—both for Harris and Foster, as well as fans of their solitary self-titled release—the South Bay-bred duo are revisiting the material from their 14-track 2002 album. Hutch and Kathy was issued on vinyl for the first time this April, and the pair will be hitting the road this month in support of the release, kicking off their tour with a hometown show this Thursday at Café Stritch.

Harris met Foster, who grew up in Sunnyvale, shortly after graduating from high school. They played together in two bands—first Haelah and later Urban Legends. As the latter group became increasingly serious, they considered moving to San Francisco, but ultimately opted to relocate to Portland instead. They’ve called the Pacific Northwest home since 1998.

“It was just much cheaper,” Harris says, reflecting on the decision to leave Silicon Valley. “That was the main reason. Even San Jose was too expensive.”

Not long after making the move, Harris and Foster began work on what would become Hutch and Kathy. Filled with rattling tambourines, wavering organ, bright steel strings and soulful harmonica bridges, they recorded Hutch and Kathy themselves, entirely on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines.

Dynamic Duo: The Thermals co-founders, Hutch and Kathy, are unplugging and getting back to basics.

He and Foster took their time with the album, Harris says—laying down tracks over the span of two years, from 2000 to 2001. And while “it feels like forever ago,” the singer and songwriter says both he and Foster are very proud of the material to this day. “To us, that record holds up really well, just because we took so much time to get it right—to get it the way we wanted it.”

Shortly after finishing the record, the duo took their songs on the road—only to quickly return to Portland upon learning that Sub Pop Records was interested in a punky demo Harris had recorded using a different moniker: The Thermals.

It was a pleasant surprise, Harris says. He had recorded the songs in the brief span between the completion of Hutch and Kathy and the tour. In that short window he had managed to slip a copy to Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard—an acquaintance he’d made while playing shows in and around Portland. Gibbard, in turn, had passed the demo on to his then-record label.

“Sub Pop was actually emailing us while we were on that tour, which was crazy,” Harris remembers. “The Thermals weren’t even a band yet. It was just some recordings I had done.”

Harris and Foster hustled back to Portland to put a band together. The Thermals would go on to record six LPs, many more EPs, and a pair of live albums. Their third record, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, garnered critical acclaim from the likes of NPR, Pitchfork and The AV Club.

Harris says he and Foster are happy to be revisiting the material more than a decade since they first laid it down to tape.

“It’s quieter; it’s not as manic as those early Thermals records,” he says, noting that he can understand why musicians so commonly progress from punk to plucking at acoustic guitars. “We’ve been doing The Thermals for 13 or 14 years now,” says Harris, who turns 40 this year. “It’s nice to go back and do something mellow at this point our life.”

But neither Harris, nor Foster, have any plans to hang up their electric guitars or unplug their amps. After the Hutch and Kathy tour, Harris says there is definitely more Thermals music to come.

And when it does, he says the hometown fans can expect to see a local Thermals show.

“We always want to come back to San Jose,” he says, reminiscing about performing at various South Bay venues—including the Caravan Lounge, Los Gatos Outhouse and Knights of Columbus Hall in Cupertino. “The shows are always good. We would come here even if we didn’t have the hometown connection.”

Watch The Thermals’ “Pillar of Salt” from their critically acclaimed, The Body, The Blood, The Machine:

Hutch and Kathy play Cafe Stritch on May 14 at 9pm. More info.