Women of Metal

They were there first

Metal is overwhelmingly male and that is a fact about the industry, not about the music. The dates below are the point of this page. Every one of them predates something this site treats as foundational, and none of them is here as a curiosity.

1. 1969 Jinx Dawson Coven

   Coven released Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls with Dawson on vocals, inverted crosses on the sleeve and a track called Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath released their first record the following year. Coven's was withdrawn within a month because the press had linked occult imagery to the Manson killings.

2. 1978 Girlschool Girlschool

   Formed in London, the same year as most of the NWOBHM. By March 1979 they were opening for Motörhead — Lemmy had heard their single and put them on the tour. In 1981 the two bands recorded together as Headgirl and went to number five in the UK. Contemporaries, not followers.

3. 1981 Sabina Classen Holy Moses

   Joined Holy Moses in Aachen, a year after the band formed and before most of the thrash on this site existed. She wanted to sing like Ozzy Osbourne and what came out instead was a roar — one of the first genuinely extreme vocal performances by anyone, of any gender, in metal.

4. 1982 Doro Pesch Warlock

   Formed Warlock in Düsseldorf. Four decades later she is still touring under her own name, which makes her career longer than most of the bands in this database.

5. 1987 Jo Bench Bolt Thrower

   Joined Bolt Thrower on bass and stayed for the band's entire recording career. Among the first women to play in an extreme metal band at all, and she did it on an instrument nobody hands out on novelty grounds.

6. 1995 Runhild Gammelsæter Thorr's Hammer

   A seventeen-year-old Norwegian exchange student in Seattle, singing for a band that existed for six weeks with two men who would go on to form Sunn O))). Dommedagsnatt is still cited by drone and doom bands thirty years on. She now holds a doctorate in cell physiology.

7. 1995 Maria "Tristessa" Kolokouri Astarte

   Founded what became Astarte in Athens — an all-women black metal band, in the least welcoming corner of the genre, for nearly twenty years. She led it until her death from leukaemia in 2014, and the band ended with her.

8. 2001 Angela Gossow Arch Enemy

   Wages of Sin. A death metal growl with nothing conceded to anybody, on a record that took Arch Enemy from respected to enormous. She later became the band's manager, which is the part of the story that usually gets left out.

9. 2010 Prika Amaral Nervosa

   Founded Nervosa in São Paulo. Brazilian thrash in the lineage of Sepultura and Sarcófago, played at least as hard, and the reason Crypta exists a decade later.

And now

• Greece Astarte, Athens — all-women black metal for two decades.
• Brazil Nervosa and Crypta, São Paulo — thrash and death metal.
• Egypt Massive Scar Era, Cairo — Cherine Amr writing metal in a place that made it difficult.
• Lebanon Slave to Sirens, Beirut — the region's first all-women thrash band.
• Germany Holy Moses and Doro, still going.

About this page

Everything here is a person, and this site currently records bands. Until it holds people — names, instruments, the years they played — this page is written by hand rather than assembled from the data, which is why it is nine entries and not ninety. It will get longer. Every date on it was checked against a source before it was published.