PORTLAND, ORE.- It’s possible that there are better people to dig you out of an ice storm than the frontwoman of a dance-punk act, but few would do it as resourcefully or cheerfully as Beth Ditto. Since her band Gossip started 25 years ago, its scrappy, do-it-yourself roots have always run strong.

Early this year, when Portland, Oregon, Ditto’s adopted home of two decades, was overtaken by a deep freeze, my windshield was a sheet of ice, and there was no scraper in sight (do better, Portland rental car agencies). Over my protestations, Ditto fished out her old ID, hopped out of the slowly warming sedan in her black beret and Chuck Taylors, and shaved the ice off herself. She has never been fazed, she said, by the unexpected.

Though Gossip has been a major label act since 2009, when it made the leap from the storied indie Kill Rock Stars to Columbia Records and megaproducer Rick Rubin, the trio has carved out a very unconventional path.

“We’re renegades,” said Ditto, who founded the group with her childhood friend Nathan Howdeshell on guitar and bass, chatting with her bandmates in drummer Hannah Blilie’s minimalist, midcentury living room, cozy against the wintry mix outside. They had gathered to talk about “Real Power,” their first album together in 12 years. Due Friday, its arrival was not preordained, or even serendipitous — it was more instinctual, a product of punk energy, somehow sustained across time, space and adulthood.

“We don’t plan,” said Howdeshell, who grew up with Ditto in small-town Arkansas. “Me and Beth just sit down and made up stuff.” They don’t talk about it, either. That might ruin it, make it feel contrived, Ditto said.

“That’s the magic of our band, I think,” Blilie added. “It just kind of falls into place.”

That is, until it didn’t.

After busting out of the fertile, queer-friendly scene in Olympia, Washington, in the late ’90s, Gossip grew from playing dingy basement shows to producing global anthems like “Standing in the Way of Control” in 2006, with Ditto as a strutting, high-octane vocal powerhouse, unafraid to take up — and proclaim — her space, as “fat, lesbian and blatantly feminist,” as she has put it.

The band found its biggest audiences in Europe and the United Kingdom, where Ditto was a frequent magazine cover star, maintaining more of a cult status at home: If you knew, you knew (and were likely transformed on the dance floor for it). Between 2001 and 2012, the group released five albums, making fans in the fashion world and the club scene, and touring with Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre. And then: a gaping pause.

They had splintered, with Howdeshell returning to Arkansas, embracing his Christianity. Ditto and her wife divorced. Their ability to push their sound — which had been trending pop — suffered, and for a few years, they worked on other projects, including a solo album for Ditto. “I think Beth was the one to say it, but it was obvious we needed a break,” Howdeshell said.

Nobody knew if they would come back together, but Ditto was proud of how resolutely they’ve felt their way through. Remember: “I love the unknown — that’s my favorite thing,” she said.

A 2019 reunion tour commemorating the 10th anniversary of its breakthrough record, “Music for Men,” paved the way for “Real Power.” Produced by Rubin, its 11 songs skip from gentler provocations like “Crazy Again,” with Ditto’s twang held aloft by Blilie’s tautly thunderous beat, to bangers where Ditto is belting in full Southern soul.

“I want real power,” she demands in the title track, over Howdeshell’s zigzag guitar and arpeggiating synth. The lyrics, inspired by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, immediately elevate to a collective call: “Do you feel what I feel?” There’s a chime like a doorbell, and the message is unmistakable: Gossip is back.

The bandmates return to a new artistic landscape though, one in which Ditto and Blilie’s queerness is no longer so alien (or alienating) to the mainstream. And the body positivity that Ditto flaunted — without ever calling it that — as she sweated through shapewear onstage and modeled couture on a Paris runway, became a full-fledged movement. Gossip danced the path, and the culture caught up.

“It’s not just queerness,” said musician JD Samson, who toured with the group in Le Tigre and Men, highlighting what set Gossip apart. “It’s punk, it’s poor, it’s fat, it’s uninhibited, you know? And the power to be unapologetic about it, and not hide behind anything.”

Ditto is a mesmerizing performer, barefoot in blunt wigs and party dresses (or far less), chatty and personal, enveloping the crowd in her core-rattling shriek.

“She gets onstage and says what’s on her mind, whether it’s controversial or not,” said Samson, who counts herself equal parts friend and fan. “And that is what’s infectious and contagious for me when I’m in the front row, screaming. I get to let go of those inhibitions that I have.”

The evening we met in Portland, the bandmates, all dressed head-to-toe in black, were otherwise a study in contrasts. Howdeshell, 44, was mostly quiet, on one end of the couch; on the other, Ditto, 43 — batting away Blilie’s pit bull, Sonny, and pit bull-boxer mix, Sheila — was her usual charming motormouth self.

Across the way, Blilie, 42, who joined the band in 2003, jumped in, too, somehow still the rational-voiced outsider. She was excited, she said, to return to a scene that was now studded with highly visible queer artists: “We were kind of on our own,” she said, which made her feel siloed. “At any festival, we were the weirdest, craziest people there.”

Ditto, though, argued that they were actually the grounded, normal — if still subversive — ones. In Manchester, England, where the band started its tour at a festival this month, she and Howdeshell posed with a sign that said, “Gossip sucks.”

Artist and musician Cody Critcheloe (who records as Ssion), has worked with Gossip for years, painting its portrait for the “Real Power” cover and directing videos for the album’s first two singles. In a phone interview, he said that Gossip’s members have been authentically themselves from the start. “Whatever they were bringing to a basement in the early 2000s,” with Ditto “in her bra and panties, that soul and spirit never changed when they were playing to, like, an arena in Italy,” he said.

Gossip’s influence reverberated widely, even for fans who never experienced a show. Jessamyn Stanley, a yoga teacher and author, discovered the band as a DJ at her college radio station in North Carolina. The group’s confidence at belonging in spaces where it was outside the norm totally subverted her worldview. “That was such a huge part of how I was radicalized, how I came to understand myself and my queer identity,” she said. “I wouldn’t be me — fat-positive activist, yoga teacher — none of that would’ve happened without Gossip, and especially Beth Ditto being who she is.”

Ditto is from tiny Judsonia, Arkansas, and Howdeshell is from neighboring Searcy, both dry towns about 50 miles from Little Rock. They formed Gossip with another Arkansas friend, Kathy Mendonça, who had led them to the ’90s punk and riot grrrl scene in Olympia. (She’s now a school counselor.) In the beginning, they were almost defiantly raw. “I remember when we learned that people tuned their guitars between songs,” Ditto said.

Though they weren’t steeped in theory, Howdeshell’s style leaned experimental — “I was using intentionally strange tunings,” he said, “very avant-garde, like taking a string a whole octave down” — and Ditto’s musical bedrock ran the gamut from British post-punk act Raincoats to Patsy Cline and Black Sabbath.

“With us, it’s just vibe and references,” Blilie said. A veteran of Portland bands like Chromatics, she joined as drummer after being blown away when she witnessed Gossip play “Standing in the Way of Control,” which Ditto wrote in response to a Bush administration proposal to ban same-sex marriage.

Rubin arrived to oversee “Music for Men,” and in 2019, Ditto came to him again, to work on what she thought might be a second solo album (her first, “Fake Sugar,” was released in 2017), before realizing she missed Howdeshell’s input, and called him in. Buoyed by Rubin’s faith — “I don’t know if I would’ve trusted anybody else,” she said — it became a Gossip album soon after that.

Rubin was eager to collaborate again. “Beth is one of the funniest people I know,” he wrote in an email, adding that she was “a naturally great singer.” And he had high praise for Howdeshell, calling him “one of the coolest musicians I’ve ever worked with.”

Ditto sang as Howdeshell jammed on guitar, bass and keys, germinating songs at Shangri-La, Rubin’s Malibu, California, studio — “a kind of automatic writing,” Rubin said — and finishing them in his private compound in Hawaii, a process that was interrupted by the pandemic.

To insiders in the music industry, Rubin is known as a conservative and perhaps an unorthodox choice to produce a band as progressive as Gossip. But he said no political divisions surfaced. “We all come from punk rock,” he said. “Punk rockers are outsiders and tend to have more in common than most other people.”

Howdeshell’s return also signified a mild reckoning. His move back to Arkansas, where he works on his family farm, had initially rattled Ditto. “It felt like a tiny betrayal,” she said, adding: “I don’t see it that way now. It had nothing to do with me.”

Howdeshell said: “I needed time to get healthy, be with my family, find a way to be grounded,” and reconnect with music outside of the industry cycle.

Ditto also had bumpy years, as her marriage to her long-term partner, Kristin Ogata, was dissolving. (The atmospheric album-ending song, “Peace and Quiet,” reflects that time, she said.) Politics and the stripping of rights for the gay community took their toll; during the pandemic, she battled depression, and was diagnosed with ADHD — which helped her understand her own needs, she said, around work and productivity. She started dating her fiance, Teddy Kwo, a trans man who played bass on her solo project, and now tours with Gossip, around 2018.

Without gigs, Blilie, meanwhile, was working as a cashier at a grocery store and volunteering for Meals on Wheels. She didn’t know that Ditto and Howdeshell had returned to the studio (no planning!) until the demos were done and she was asked to lay down the percussion. “I was surprised to get the call,” she said. “It definitely reignited an energy.”

The first thing Ditto did when Gossip reformed, she said, was apologize to Blilie — a pragmatic, orderly, perfectionist artist — for all the churn she put her through.

“This band has taught me to let go of a lot of that stuff,” Blilie said.

After hanging at Blilie’s house, Ditto and I drove, with my newly cleared windshield, to her place with Kwo — a two-story in what she called a fancy neighborhood. He brought her a drink, and she gave a tour of their tastefully maximalist, vibrant space. Its heart, for her, is her carefully organized craft room, with pink pegboard hung with embroidery, and on an upper shelf, a collage designer Alexander McQueen made for her, one of the few emblems of her high-fashion life.

This is Ditto’s radical, creative patchwork. “I think sometimes just existing is so hard for people — all kinds of people,” she said, herself included. “And so sometimes just writing a song about absolutely [expletive] nothing is such an act of freedom.”

The forces against that might be strong. And still, she said, “they’re not going to steal our joy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.