Asklemmy

Some faves of mine I haven't seen mentioned yet:

• Castrator (all-female band, death metal)
• Nervosa (all-female, thrash)
• Cerebral Bore (brutal death metal, slammy)
• Abnormality (tech death)
• Walls of Jericho (metalcore)

elveitie: the call of the mountains

After my teenage years it's been very rare for me to dig into a band deeply enough to learn anything about their members, so the easiest examples are all going to be women doing clean vocals, which is the one time you can (usually) explicitly tell the difference just by listening. Some of my favorite examples are Liv Kristine's work in Theatre of Tragedy, Tarja-era Nightwish, the first Stolen Babies album, and Sirenia's first two albums along with all of Tristania's discography pre-Rubicon.

I have two examples that immediately come to mind outside clean vocals:

Samantha Escarbe is the guitarist for Virgin Black and my understanding is she essentially splits the songwriting load with Rowan London. The Requiem stuff I still need to give more listens, but I think the first two albums are absolutely spectacular music. In "Museum of Iscariot" she does one of my favorite guitar solos I've ever heard.

Angela Gossow's vocals on Arch Enemy's "Wages of Sin" album are some of the absolute best in metal. I live for that shit. I never really got into anything else Arch Enemy did though.

I saw the "Women in Metal" title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

Symphonic epic folk metal with female singers is my jams

• Grai - Russian pagan / folk metal
• Folterkammer - Operatic / symphonic black metal
• Draconian - Swedish doom / goth metal
• Messa - Scarlet Doom metal
• Wardruna - Nordic folk metal

The lead singer can’t sing anymore so they broke up. But Unsun was great.

I always liked this Faye Wong song. Not hard enough to be metal, but I think it's still edgy and kind of haunting.

Within Temptation, Lacuna Coil. Does Blackmore's Night count? Actually, I don't know if any of these technically count as metal. But I like them anyway.

There's a ton of great women in metal, I'll drop two.

Mares of Thrace, Calgary AB based sludge/post/hardcore 2 piece, guitarist/vocalist is part of the original lineup, it's heavy and catchy.

I really like Hulder, black metal solo project, some of her early demos are amazing, this version of Into The Crypt of Rays comes to mind, got a wall flag of the art from this in my office.

Jinjer.

Spiritbox

Jinjer

Make Them Suffer

Arch Enemy

Lucrecia

Poppy

Within Temptation

Babymetal

Harper

Those are the ones I listen to, in no particular order

Cloud Rat

hevy

calm

UNLEASH THE ARCHERS. By far my favorite band.

Hmm, I always have a hard time picking favorites, but I've always enjoyed Halestorm! Pretty sure "can u see me in the dark?" has been pinned in the number one spot of my On Repeat playlist on Spotify for a couple of months now... Lzzy's vocals are fantastic in it!

Also, a couple of years ago Alex Reade joined Make Them Suffer, and I've been enjoying their latest album (also called Make Them Suffer), a few of the tracks from that album (Epitaph, Oscillator, Weaponized, and Small Town Syndrome) have also coincidentally been stuck in my On Repeat playlist for a while.

I really like Nao from Maximum the Hormone, a Japanese metal band.

Great drummer, great voice, and she is hilarious. Her banter with Daisuke on their radio show they used to host was god damn hilarious.

In This Moment

I used to love them when I was little, then forgot about them for a decade. They've only improved over time.

Stolen Babies is a long time favorite too, I love Dominique Persi

Theatres des Vampires is also fun

The Birthday Massacre of course

Throwing some support in for Nightwish. They've some good shit.

Recently, Oceans Of Slumber, great combination of beauty and brutality

I also discoverd a few months back Haydee Irizarry from Aversed and Carnivora, but I can't find any recent stuff with her (at least in metal) which is sad since she seems to be a talented vocalist and musician

But also a good bunch of bands : Jinjer, Kittie, ETHS, Crypta, Stolen Babies, anything with Anneke van Giersbergen

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot since I only thought about vocalists (Gorod, for example, had a beast of a female drummer on their early albums)

In addition to the bands already listed I wanted to add:

Burning Witches is an all female Swiss heavy/power metal band. I found them while listening to Dio covers.

Frozen Crown is a female fronted Italian Power Metal band.

Volturian is a female fronted Italian symphonic metal band.

Acid King

Witch Mountain

SubRosa

Bloody Panda

Couch Slut (more hardcore/noise)

Oh man, right now it's Spirit Box, the Warning, Castle Rat, Crypta, Lizzies, and of course Unleash the Archers. Eleine can't be forgotten, even though they're not in heavy rotation for me. Kittie is in that same range where their most recent album is just old enough that it's fallen out of heavy rotation for me

If you wanna step to more of a hard rock end of things, Halestorm is awesome.

If you consider Linkin Park in the same category, Emily has been killing it (but any asshat that whines at me about that is just getting blocked because it was a stupid fucking thing to begin with), so they would deserve a mention even though they aren't historically a female fronted band, and folks love to argue about them being metal at all.

Going back, Lita Ford rode the line between hard rock and metal, as did Joan Jett. Both from the Runaways which was the all girl hard rock band. Vixen may have been better barely hard rock, but they deserve more respect than they get.

That's just the stuff that's in my main playlist of harder rock and metal right now. There's a ton of great bands out there that are woman led.

And hell, you can't really talk about that without at least giving a nod to Doro Pesch, and even Wendy O. They stand out among some of the earlier examples

But, right now, there's so many good to great bands that are female led, or even all women. It's an embarrassment of riches.

Delain (Dutch, started as a side project from one of the Within Temptation members)

Flyleaf

Within Temptation (also Dutch)

Amaranthe

Arkona - the best folk metal Hulder - great black metal

I’ll be seeing Arkona again in < two weeks!

Daedric.

The coop with Dal Av is amazing!

Dark Castle - Surrender to All Life Beyond Form

Female-fronted stoner/sludge doom.

Saw them open for the almighty YOB back in 2011. Stevie Floyd is a badass.

Unleash the Archers, many good ones but I really like the album Apex and especially Shadow Guide and The Matriarch

A Sound of Thunder, Queen of hell and A Sound of Thunder might be my favorites but many greats imo

CASTLE RAT

Some of my favorites are:

Delain (who I'm seeing live tonight!)

Nightwish

Xandria

Epica

Jinjer

Arch Enemy

The Agonist

Crypta

Blackbriar

Cellar Darling

Butcher Babies

Spiritbox

Eleine

In This Moment

Nervosa

Frantic Amber

Within Temptation

Infected Rain

Visions Of Atlantis has two singers, male and female, with the female being the lead. I forget their names, and I know a quick google search would tell me, but I'm having trouble balancing this message and the steering wheel, plus this bowl of soup is REALLY hot.

Closet Witch

Sylvaine

Frayle

Cellar Darling

Tristania

After Forever

Just to name a handful off the top of my head.

Otep and Kittie are awesome.

Maria Brink and In This Moment

Gotta mention Spiritbox. Courtney is one of the most celebrated modern metalcore singers.

Lots of great bands here already, and some new to me! One of my favorites I haven't seen here is Spiritbox... Courtney Laplante reminds me of Angela Gossow and Tatiana Shmayluk, she has the nice clean vocals as well as the super gutteral growl.

https://youtu.be/vVDXTFeGYwc

The Breeders kicked fucking ass - Kim Deal went on to form the Pixies but her first project is absolutely worth a listen as well.

Jinger band with Tatiana Shmayluk as vocalist is crazy good.

Anna Murphy (ex-Eluveitie, Cellar Darling) is probably my top metal hottie

My bits:

Amaranthe Angtoria Cinnamon Babe Dorothy Nightwish Venus 5

I’d like to recommend the 2 plasmatics albums; “Coup d’Eta” and “Maggots: the record”.

Maybe not exactly what people are here for but i’d be remiss if I didn’t mention these amazingly heavy albums.