For over fifteen years, Kristin Forbes has worn her nom de guerre, Lady Hatchet, like a suit of armor, fearlessly following her muse and love of Jamaican music into the many musical projects and places it has taken her. She is a multi-instrumentalist, as well as a singer/song-writer and band leader, who has played guitar, bass, and even keyboards for some of the most renowned American ska bands (The Slackers, The Toasters, The Pietasteres, Stubborn All-Stars).

For fourteen years, she led The Scotch Bonnets, a punky-reggae crew out of Baltimore, as they toured the United States extensively, released two albums of her songs (an infectious blend of Jamaican-inspired grooves mixed with American rock and R&B stylings) on Jump Up Records: 2019’s Come On Over and 2023’s re-release of the Bonnets’ 2013 debut Live Ya Life, as well as numerous singles and the 2014 Quest EP in collaboration with HR of Bad Brains.

Kristin, who started playing ska in Boston in the late 1990s and self-released her first solo EP in 2002, spent a month on the Vans Warped Tour in 2011, playing with Fishbone’s legendary frontman Angelo Moore; that collaboration became the 2015 album, Ska Do Au Ska Don’t (released on Japanese label, Ska In The World).

Around the same time she became Lady Hatchet, Kristin started playing in Baltimore’s premiere ska-reggae band The Players Band when she moved to Charm City in 2008 and is now their full-time bass player. In 2019, she became the lead guitar player in an all-female lineup of Strykers Posse, a foundational roots-reggae crew that began in Baltimore in the 1980s.

During the pandemic, Lady Hatchet helped to start the all-female ska supergroup Rude Girl Revue, which features queens from the hottest ska bands on the East Coast and is now an outlet for some of her most overtly feminist songwriting. She also produced numerous songs that became two solo Lady Hatchet EPs (including Odds & Ends on Jump Up), 20 episodes of a live stream variety show called A Slice Of Hatchet, and developed her acoustic ska act, which led to a solo European tour in 2022, as well as two solo Midwest tours in 2023 and her first Nashville showcase.

In 2024, while helping to shepherd Rude Girl Revue through three releases (a holiday 45 and Retrospective CD on Jump Up, as well as the digital, self-released Supernova EP), Hatchet divided her time between playing acoustically in/around Baltimore and West Virginia with bassist Jade Tremba, doing a live soundclash with Dunia & Aram (in which the group plays one of her songs, then one of their songs, back and forth all night), touring solo in the southwest with Claire Liparulo (of The Freecoasters), and putting together a new band, the Lady Hatchet Quartet, to back her upon the release of her next album (hopefully in 2025), all while teaching guitar lessons in the Washington DC-area, which she has done since 2008.

Lady Hatchet is now booked by Loose Leaf Talent Agency, proudly sponsored by Reverend Guitars, and has paid her mortgage since 2010 with income solely made through music. No one can ever say that Lady Hatchet isn’t doing the damn thing.