Alt-rock heroes Blake Babies played a series of afternoon reunion sets earlier this month in Boston, their first performances together in 15 years. The Juliana Hatfield-led trio reformed to celebrate the release of demos for their 1988 debut album Earwig. They have some more sets coming up this Saturday, 7/23 in Evanston, Illinois, and to mark the occasion, they’ve shared audio of “Lament” from one of the 7/9 performances in Boston. This is the first live recording the band has released in almost 20 years. Listen below, where you’ll also find some words from Blake Babies member John Strohm.

Here’s Strohm on the reunion:

I can only speak for myself, but it felt both completely natural and completely bizarre at the same time making music with Freda and Juliana again. But if we weren’t all completely proud of the songs and what we created back then, there’s no way we could make it work. It took quite a bit of work, both apart and eventually together in a room, to make it actually sound good enough to honor the legacy. But it was very worth it and now I hope we can find our way further into the material, and hopefully explore new challenges. It was also a real pleasure to get to meet most of you who came to the shows. It isn’t a big surprise that our fans are smart, cool people with diverse musical tastes, but it’s great to confirm. We really had fun meeting you all. We’re counting the days until the Evanston shows. We don’t have a plan yet for the set list in Evanston – we’re all back to our lives for the time being. But we’ll start giving it some serious thoughtwith an eye to changing it up at least a bit. It’s a bigger room, so it will probably feel a bit more like a conventional rock show, and we’ll take advantage of that in planning out the set. Now that we’re pretty comfortable with the songs we did in Somerville, we’ll mix it up again and learn at least a few more from the archive and maybe try something new. I’m sure we’ll have fun with it again. We’re also really looking forward to meeting more committed fans of the band and getting to hang out with a bunch of friends in Chicago. Between the fans and the friends from the old days, we’re hoping for some powerful energy in that room to fuel our rock.

The Blake Babies play the SPACE in Evanston starting at 1:30PM this Saturday, 7/23. Tickets are available here.