Tami Hart has spent much of her life making music on her own terms, even when that has meant walking away from it entirely.

Hart was 19 when The New York Times took notice of her debut album, No Light in August, praising its “raw heartbreakers,” “preternatural wisdom” and the “fervor of the loudest punk rock.” Growing up queer in a conservative, working-class Southern family, Hart found in music both an escape and a way into a world that had once seemed inaccessible to her.

Her first record deal came from queercore pioneer Kaia Wilson of Team Dresch and The Butchies, who released Hart’s early work through Mr. Lady Records. Hart went on to release the solo albums No Light in August and What Passed Between Us, tour with artists including Sleater-Kinney and Indigo Girls, and later play in bands including Making Friendz and MEN. More than two decades after Hart’s debut, Kathleen Hanna recalled her in the memoir Rebel Girl, describing a guitar style reminiscent of some of Nirvana’s biggest hits transformed into something folkier, carried by Hart’s “big, twangy, vulnerable voice.”

After more than a decade of recording and touring, Hart stepped away from music. She got married, started a family, divorced, married again, got sober and built a life largely outside the music industry. The distance ultimately gave her a different relationship to songwriting and to the idea of herself as an artist.

Now Hart has returned to solo recording with Tami Hart, her third solo album and first in more than two decades, produced by Ted Leo and released by Don Giovanni Records. Rather than attempting to recreate the artist she was at 19, Hart writes from everything that came afterward. Her songs are shaped by sobriety, parenthood, queerness, class, aging, ambition and the complicated question of what it means to return to something she once thought she had left behind.