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.

Every February for for the past three years, longtime local music promoter Eric Fanali has devoted all his energy to wrangling nerds—herding a large and disparate group of indie rockers, chiptune artists and video game fanatics into the same place for a weekend-long video game and music festival known as Rockage. His job description does not entail micromanaging what they do once they get there, however. Half the fun of Rockage comes from the chaotic and unexpected interactions that inevitably take place.

And besides, in many cases, Fanali says he just doesn’t want to know.

“I don’t want to be liable,” Fanali jokes, as he considers what the weirdo, anti-band duo Gnarboots might have in store for their Rockage 4.0 set. Last year it involved an Elvis impersonator and reams of toilet paper. This year, rumors abound, though no one really knows what’s going to happen—least of all the band, which consists of an iPod and two longtime musicians who intentionally don’t practice.

“We’re shaking you out of your band expectations,” says Aaron Carnes, one half of Gnarboots and Metro contributor. “It’s unusual and jarring in a fun way.”

It would seem that the Gnarboots philosophy lines up pretty neatly with Fanali’s. A spirit of spontaneity informs the planned (and unplanned) collaborations that result from cramming 42 bands full of talented and obsessive (often one and the same) folks into one room full of old-school arcade games and letting it rip.

Fanali recalls a scene from a previous year: local video-game-jazz-jammers Super Soul Bros. were backing rappers Boboso and Mega Ran when they suddenly broke into an impromptu cover of a song from the 1997 Playstation rhythm game, PaRappa the Rapper.

Not all of the groups have direct ties to video game music. Festival headliners, The Thermals, for one, are a Portland-based indie punk band with roots in the South Bay. The band is, however, super into retro arcade games. “Galaga is my favorite, I’ll never stop playing Galaga,” says singer and guitarist Hutch Harris, noting that bassist Kathy Foster likes Centipede and drummer Westin Glass has professed his love for Burger Time—an obscure 1982 arcade game based around assembling massive hamburgers.

And actually, The Thermals’ latest album, Desperate Ground, may have a deeper connection to retro arcade. “Not a plot, but this theme, this story running through Desperate Ground,” Harris says. “The story was this loner, lost in the woods, being hunted. Wes and I were playing so much Galaga when we were working on Desperate Ground, Galaga kind of fit into that theme. Like, someone who had gone rogue from the army was killing all alone. In Galaga, you don’t know who the hell you are.”

The Thermals have roots in the South Bay and love ‘Galaga.’

The other headliners, Bit Brigade and Minibosses, are direct video game music bands. Bit Brigade will be debuting their soundtrack for the original NES Metroid at Rockage.

The Minibosses were one of the first bands to seriously cover video game music, and have been building a cult following since they began playing NES covers in 1999. “They’re so good,” Fanali raves. “They don’t need to prove anything.” The band is planning a collaborative set with Gnarboots, entitled “Gnarbosses.”

Much of the rest of the line-up will be recognizable to local music fans: indie rockers Curious Quail, The Albert Square and Zen Zenith, chiptune acts Crashfaster, The Mineral Kingdom and Petriform, plus some out-of-towners like The Y Axes and Sacramento-based sister punk duo Dog Party.

Bands are pitching in to run parts of the event as well. Zen Zenith will be hosting the table top/board game area, in addition to running a live Dungeons and Dragons game. The Super Soul Bros. are managing one of the stages, on top of their four scheduled sets. “It’s a community where everyone joins in,” Fanali says.

Fanali, who’s been booking shows for the past 18 years in the Bay Area, has self-funded (and lost money on) Rockage each year. This year, a similar festival out of Maryland, MAGfest, is co-sponsoring the festival, hoping to gain a foothold for a West Coast version MAGWest. “I’d like to expand Rockage every year even with MagWEST around,” says Fanali. “But I don’t want it to be a giant 10,000-plus festival. I like to keep it more intimate where you have a chance to meet everybody. I like the opportunity to socially game with these people.”

Rockage 4.0 runs from Friday, Feb. 6 through Sunday, Feb. 8 at various venues around San Jose State University. More info.

Check out “Pillar of Salt” by The Thermals:

The last record the Thermals released, Personal Life back in 2010, was not quite the frantic explosion their fans expected. It was a downright hook-driven, midtempo, New Wave production—quite different from the unhinged urgency present on early indie-punk recordings.

The band, in fact, received plenty of emails and letters from fans addressing the album’s change of sound.

“People like this band when it’s irrational and crazy, when it kind of rails against the world,” says lead singer/guitarist Hutch Harris. “We learned what made people fall in love with this band in the first place, ’cause they told us. They definitely told us.”

Those fans will be happy to know that the Thermals are returning to form for their upcoming record, Desperate Ground, which comes out April 16 on Saddle Creek Records. And those early classic Thermals records—the first three—will be reissued on vinyl on March 5.

According to Harris, Desperate Ground sounds a lot like More Parts Per Million (2003), their first record, and the critically acclaimed The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006), their third album. He insists that the return to the noisy, chaotic sound is unrelated to the fans’ response but has more to do with what music has been playing in their iPods.

“We’ve just been listening to a lot of the bands that we grew up with, like the punk bands we loved: Agent Orange, Black Flag. When we were making Personal Life we were totally listening to the Cure and New Order,” Harris explains.

The first single off Desperate Ground, “Born to Kill,” released Feb. 11, isn’t quite the fiery mess that characterized More Parts Per Million, but it definitely swings the band back into punk-rock territory once again. As the title suggests, the lyrics talk bluntly about death, violence and war, which are ongoing themes on the album.

“Human violence is such a huge part of all our lives. The story of human history is mostly war and violence. It’s just inevitable. It’s not an anti-war record. It’s not a pro-war record. It’s definitely right in the middle. It’s more talking about how war and violence are inevitable,” Harris says.

This isn’t the first time the Thermals have taken on specific issues on an album. The Body, the Blood, the Machine discussed religion and fascism at length, which was, in part, why critics fell in love with the album.

When the Thermals do approach political content, they aren’t so much political in the traditional sense as they are sharing their own experiences, what they’ve seen as regular people and how these issues have affected their lives.

“Too many punk bands want to preach,” Harris says. “I don’t feel like I want to tell people that this is how it is, and this is what’s wrong. We’re not trying to tell people what to think or do.”

The immediacy found on those early records was actually a stark contrast to Harris and bass player Kathy Foster’s previous band, Hutch and Kathy, which they started shortly after moving to Portland. (They lived here in the South Bay until they were 21 and played in such bands as Haelah and the Urban Legends).

They spent a full year writing and recording their one and only album as Hutch and Kathy. It’s a carefully crafted, bouncy pop record that garnered almost no attention. For fun, they pulled out their four-track and wrote and recorded several songs without the extensive planning and meticulous recording techniques: just raw and intense. These songs eventually became More Parts Per Million. It wasn’t long before Sub Pop wanted to release it.

“A lot of times when you’re making something, you’re trying to do something different than what you just did. It was like writing a song in a day, recording it that day, mixing it the next day. It was fun and refreshing to work that way, which was the opposite way that we had been working,” Harris says.

Even though capturing that same immediacy was important for Desperate Ground, they spent nearly two years writing songs for it. They tossed out a lot of songs, anything that didn’t sound just like they wanted.

“We weren’t going to rush to make another record. We were going to make sure that we were going to make a record that we really liked,” Harris continues.

Instead of a four-track, they recorded Desperate Ground at a studio in Hoboken, N.J., with producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth). They finished recording only hours before Hurricane Sandy tore through the region. “We were holed up in the producer’s house with no power for another four days,” Harris recalls. “We’re just sitting and drinking wine in the dark waiting for the storm to pass.”