"Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard," declared X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene on the 1977 single "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" And when all-female punk band the Slits burst on the UK scene that same year, opening for the Clash, they scared the crap out of those people.

Singer Ari Up was just 14 when the Slits started in 1976. Three years later, she and bandmates Tessa Pollitt and Viv Albertine posed topless and slathered in mud on the cover of their 1979 debut album, Cut. Although they could barely play their instruments at the outset, they soon won a rabid following, largely thanks to their reputation as uncontrollable wild women.

Now, 25 years after the original incarnation dissolved, Ari Up chuckles when asked about her pre-Slits childhood. "I was actually very quiet," she says. "I didn't have many friends. I came home from school and played piano, and kept to myself. But everyone perceives me as having been noisy and rambunctious, because that's what I later became.

"The joyous, wild-and-free part of me, that was always me there. I was born an entertainer. I wasn't shy, when it came to the stage."

But while artists like the Slits, Styrene, and Siouxsie Sioux were dashing notions of how women in rock were supposed to behave, the men behind the scenes in the music business didn't welcome them warmly. "Mostly, my memories are really terrible ones," Up recalls of her early interactions with stagehands and techies.

"We were probably rude, too, but in a nervous way," she concedes. "Especially if we felt we didn't get any support, and no one understood what the fuck we were doing. I was probably shouting, 'I can't hear, turn up the mic!' and then [the sound guy] would call me a brat. It was a pretty rough time for us then."

One of the last original punk bands to sign a record deal, the group made up for lost time with the innovative Cut. Featuring staccato guitar riffs, pulsating tribal rhythms, and sing-song vocals punctuated with birdlike trills as well as gruff shouts, the Slits sounded like no one else on originals like "Typical Girls" and their kinetic version of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine."

"Obviously, we had moved on from 1977," says Up. Musicians like dub-reggae mavericks Dennis Bovell and Adrian Sherwood, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and his stepdaughter Neneh, and Bristol post-punks the Pop Group were all part of their creative universe. "We kept evolving quickly, and felt so inspired, that we had to keep trying to make people hear our music." In 1980, they released three groundbreaking independent singles, including the stop-start jam "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm."

The Slits disbanded in late 1981, after releasing their dark sophomore set, Return of the Giant Slits. There was, Up insists, no animosity between the members. "We remained friendly; we didn't talk, but that didn't mean we were enemies." The singer left London ("to stay would have been suicide for me"), and today divides her time between Jamaica and Brooklyn. But when she ran into Pollitt while promoting her 2005 solo release Dread More Dan Dead, they decided the time was ripe for the Slits to rise again.

The band's current incarnation includes Up and Pollitt, plus several new members, including Hollie Cook, daughter of Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Their new three-song EP, Revenge of the Killer Slits, offers a crash course in the band's eclectic sound. "Slits Tradition" reasserts their strong feminist stance via chanted vocals and a throbbing bass riff. "Number One Enemy" is the first official recording of one of the Slits' earliest songs, a blistering blast-from-the-past featuring Marco Pirroni of Adam and the Ants on guitar and Cook senior on drums, while "Kill Them with Love" puts a drum and bass spin on a number Up originally cut as a solo artist.

Expect a healthy dose of new material along with old in concert. "I want to make sure the Slits are not mistaken for retro or vintage," concludes Up. It may have been a quarter-century since the Slits last toured the U.S., but they have not mellowed with age. "We're definitely still a threat."