The Architects
Written By Sabbatha Ashvale
This is not a list built on quotas or trends, this is a lineage.
Five women. Chosen carefully. Not because there aren’t others worthy, but because each of these stories demands room to breathe.
These are not short profiles. These are long form reckonings. Careers carved under pressure. Power claimed, not granted.
Different eras. Different sounds. Different weapons. The common thread is refusal.
They defied the odds stacked against women in loud, male dominated spaces. They pushed boundaries that were never meant to move.
They were fearless with their sexuality, identities, anger, softness, and ambition. Not to provoke for attention, but to exist fully on their own terms.
This series is not about tearing down the patriarchy. Metal was not built by one gender, and it doesn’t survive on exclusion.
This is about understanding why women belong beside men in heavy music, not as exceptions or novelties, but as architects of its past, present, and future.
Each of these women fought a version of the same fight and won it in their own lane. They challenged the industry head on. Bent it until it cracked and rewrote the emotional language of heavy music entirely.
All of them changed the landscape so the next generation wouldn’t have to ask permission just to stand on the stage.
This is not mythology, it’s work, will, and survival.
Welcome To The Architects
Nita Strauss . Shirley Manson . Madonna Alanis Morissette . Taylor Momsen
A Rip in Time: Women in Metal. A Metal Lair Original Series
Explore previous chapters of A Rip in Time: Women in Metal, including The Dangerous Ones, The Rebellious Ones and The Defiant Ones.
A Moment in Time: Nita Strauss, Alice Cooper, The Iron Maidens
Moment: “The Wolf You Feed” (feat. Alissa White-Gluz)
This is the point where Nita Strauss stops being framed as the hired gun and steps forward as the artist.
“The Wolf You Feed” broke through outside the Alice Cooper machine and shifted the conversation. People stopped saying Alice Cooper’s guitarist and started saying Nita Strauss. Not because of proximity to legacy, but because the work demanded it.
The song announced her as a modern lead guitarist with authorship and someone shaping sound and direction, not just executing parts at a world-class level.
If touring proved Nita Strauss belonged on the biggest stages in metal, “The Wolf You Feed” was the moment she stepped forward and claimed her own name.
Deep Cut: “Dead Inside”(2023)
If “The Wolf You Feed” announced Nita Strauss to the wider world, “Dead Inside” is where the nuance lives.
This track doesn’t chase spectacle. It shows restraint, groove and control. It’s Nita stepping away from the expectation that technical players need to constantly prove speed or aggression to justify their presence. She lets space do some of the work. The phrasing breathes. The confidence is quiet but unmistakable.
“Dead Inside” is underrated because it doesn’t scream for attention. It reveals a guitarist who understands pacing, texture, and mood just as deeply as precision. This is the kind of song that musicians notice first. The kind that tells you someone isn’t just impressive, they’re intentional.
It also reinforces what makes Nita an architect rather than a novelty. Her authority doesn’t come from excess. It comes from knowing exactly when not to overplay.
Why Them:
Nita Strauss didn’t ask for a seat with the knights at the round table because she understood something fundamental about how those tables work. You don’t arrive by permission. You arrive by proving you belong.
She brought her own rig, plugged in, and met the tradition on its own terms. No spectacle. No demands. Just the discipline, precision, and command required to stand shoulder to shoulder with players who’ve defined the language of heavy music for decades.
That’s what makes her an architect. Not defiance for its own sake, but respect for the craft paired with the confidence to claim space within it. Strauss doesn’t challenge the idea of mastery in metal. She upholds it.
There’s nothing radical about that. It’s how music has always moved forward. Skill recognizes skill. Authority answers to competence. The room opens when the work is undeniable.
Nita Strauss has that uncommon magnetism where admiration cuts across gender lines, respected by men, aspirational to women, undeniable to everyone in the room.
Nita Strauss didn’t change the rules of the table, she understood the assignment and earned her place alongside legends.
A Moment in Time: Shirley Manson, Garbage
Moment: “Stupid Girl”(1996)
“Stupid Girl” didn’t just arrive as a song, it arrived as a warning shot.
When Shirley Manson delivered it in 1996, the language for what she was critiquing barely existed. There was no influencer economy yet. No algorithm. No monetized visibility loop built on appearance, performance, and curated desirability. And yet, the song mapped it with unnerving accuracy.
This wasn’t a condemnation of women. It was an exposure of a system that rewards surface over substance and calls that empowerment.
A culture that teaches women to perform themselves into relevance, to trade authenticity for attention and mistake attention for power.
That’s why “Stupid Girl” still lands hard decades later. It sounds like it was written for a generation navigating filters, followers, and visibility as currency.
Shirley wasn’t mocking femininity or ambition. She was asking a sharper question: What are you being asked to give up to be seen?
The song worked because Shirley stood inside pop culture and challenged it from within. She didn’t opt out or moralize. She held up the mirror and refused to soften the reflection.
That posture, cool, confrontational, and unflinching made the song feel less like commentary and more like a cultural interruption.
“Stupid Girl” was ahead of its time because it understood something early, visibility without agency isn’t freedom. It’s another costume.
That realization didn’t just cement Shirley Manson as the face of Garbage.
It positioned her as a voice willing to tell uncomfortable truths and trust women to hear them.
Deep Cut: “Androgyny” (2001)
If “Stupid Girl” exposed the performance women are pressured to give, “Androgyny” asked the next question, what happens when you refuse the costume entirely?
Released in the early 2000s, the song landed years before mainstream culture had language for fluid identity, let alone the courage to talk about it without panic.
Shirley didn’t frame gender as provocation or rebellion. She treated it as something personal, lived-in, and unremarkable which, at the time, was the most radical move possible.
“Androgyny” wasn’t chasing shock. It wasn’t asking permission. It simply existed, calmly dismantling the idea that expression needs approval or categorization to be valid.
That quiet confidence is why the song still feels current now, in a cultural moment once again obsessed with policing identity and rolling progress backward under the guise of tradition.
What makes this track a deep cut rather than a headline moment is subtlety. It didn’t explode on impact. It lingered and waited. And now it sounds less like a product of its era and more like a message that arrived early and never stopped being relevant.
“Stupid Girl” held up the mirror and “Androgyny” walked away from it.
Together, they reveal Shirley Manson not just as a critic of culture, but as someone willing to imagine and model another way of being visible without surrendering yourself to the gaze.
Why Them:
Shirley Manson belongs among The Architects because she didn’t just succeed in heavy music, she changed the emotional rules of the room.
Shirley never positioned herself against men. She positioned herself beside them, fully formed, intellectually armed, and unwilling to be flattened into something easier to digest.
In a genre that often celebrates dominance and volume, she introduced another kind of power, control without cruelty, sexuality without submission and visibility without self erasure.
What made Shirley dangerous and enduring was her refusal to perform ignorance. She was articulate. She was confrontational without being chaotic. She had enough faith in her audience to challenge them, and respected women enough to tell them the truth without wrapping it in reassurance.
She didn’t ask women to opt out of desire or ambition. She asked them to own themselves inside it. To recognize the difference between attention and agency. To stand in public without turning themselves into product.
That’s architecture.
Shirley created space for women to be complex onstage. Angry and intelligent, seductive and autonomous, soft and unyielding all without having to justify the contradiction.
She proved that you could front a band, dominate a visual culture, and still keep authorship intact.
Her influence isn’t loud because it doesn’t need to be. You can hear it in every woman who refuses to play dumb to be palatable. In every artist who understands that being seen is only powerful if you decide how you’re seen.
Shirley Manson didn’t tear the house down. She redrew the blueprint and invited everyone capable of respect to walk inside.
A Moment in Time: Madonna
Moment: Lucky Star (1983)
It was early afternoon. MTV on. The room unchanged and then suddenly, not.
When Madonna appeared singing “Lucky Star,” she didn’t arrive like an industry invention. She arrived like a signal. Nobody had heard of her yet, and somehow it already felt obvious that was about to change.
She was fully clothed. Lace, rubber bangles, crucifixes, messy hair. Nothing about it was traditionally seductive and yet it was unmistakably sexual.
Not inviting. Not performing for approval. Self-possessed. Comfortable in her body in a way that didn’t ask permission or soften itself for the male gaze. That was the rupture.
You could feel the tension in the room immediately, judgment and fascination colliding in real time. Men called her names while they couldn’t look away. Women clocked something else entirely, confidence that didn’t explain itself. Desire that belonged to the person inhabiting it.
After “Lucky Star,” Madonna didn’t just blow up, she flooded the culture. Video after video. Reinvention after reinvention. She moved faster than the backlash could keep up, pushing sexuality, religion, gender roles, race, and power straight into the mainstream conversation and refusing to step back when it got uncomfortable.
This wasn’t accidental longevity. It was authorship.
She built an empire by staying ahead of the fear she provoked. She owned her work. She owned her image. She was one of the first female artists to have her own high-profile record label, Maverick Records.
She didn’t just survive long enough to become legacy, she used that power to open doors, signing artists like Alanis Morissette on instinct, recognizing something raw and real before the rest of the industry caught up.
“Lucky Star” wasn’t just a hit. It was the moment a woman showed up in public owning her sexuality without offering it up for consumption and the culture never quite recovered.
Deep Cut: “Oh Father” (1989)
“Oh Father” is one of the bleakest songs Madonna ever released, not because it’s sensational, but because it’s restrained.
The song sits at the intersection of childhood grief and authority. After losing her mother young, Madonna grew up under a figure defined by discipline, distance, and expectation.
“Oh Father” isn’t a cry for comfort. It’s a confrontation with the emotional architecture of control. The kind that teaches obedience before understanding and silence before safety.
What makes the song unsettling is its clarity. There’s no melodrama, no self-pity. Just the recognition that reverence can coexist with fear, and that love doesn’t cancel damage. Madonna doesn’t ask to be forgiven or rescued. She names the cost and steps away from it.
For its time, that was radical. Music didn’t make space for women to talk about authority figures, especially fathers without either sanctifying them or collapsing into victimhood.
Madonna did neither. She claimed her autonomy by refusing to carry someone else’s power inside her any longer.
That quiet refusal is why “Oh Father” was pivotal. It explains the steel beneath the spectacle.
Why Them:
Madonna isn’t included here because she sounded metal. She’s here because she operated like it.
Madonna took on the institutions most artists are taught to tiptoe around. Religion, misogyny, racism, sexuality, bodily autonomy and did it in full view of the mainstream.
Not from the safety of the underground. Not wrapped in metaphor so thick it could be ignored. She put these confrontations directly into pop culture’s bloodstream and let the backlash prove her point.
She challenged religious authority by refusing to separate spirituality from flesh. She confronted racism by centering Black imagery and bodies in spaces that treated them as symbols but denied them reverence. She treated women’s desire, ambition, and autonomy as non-negotiable facts rather than moral questions.
She exposed misogyny in music by surviving it, repeatedly without retreating, softening, or asking to be understood.
And long before it was safe, profitable, or celebrated, Madonna stood openly with the LGBTQ plus community. Not as an accessory, but as an ally willing to take real heat.
During the AIDS epidemic, when fear and misinformation were killing people faster than the virus itself, she refused silence. She centered queer lives, queer bodies, queer grief, and queer joy at a time when much of the world preferred erasure.
That support wasn’t symbolic. It was visible, sustained, and public woven into her art, her performances, and her platform when doing so meant backlash, boycotts, and moral outrage. She didn’t wait for permission to care, and she didn’t abandon the cause when the headlines moved on.
That kind of loyalty, when it costs something is rare. And it’s part of why her work resonates so deeply across generations and identities. Madonna didn’t just challenge power for herself. She stood beside people the system was actively discarding and said, you belong here too.
That, more than any genre label, is what makes her architecture unmistakably metal. What makes Madonna truly architectural is not shock value. It’s endurance.
She absorbed censorship, boycotts, moral panic, and ridicule and kept moving forward, reinvesting power back into herself. She owned her work. She built her own infrastructure. She handpicked and elevated other women before the industry learned how to say the word “allyship,” recognizing talent on instinct rather than approval.
Metal has always respected artists who stand their ground in hostile territory. By that measure, Madonna’s work is heavier than distortion.
She confronted systems designed to control bodies and silence dissent and did it with visibility so complete there was nowhere to look away.
She didn’t reject masculinity. She didn’t demonize men. She simply refused to be ruled by them. That refusal sustained, strategic, and public is metal at its core.
Madonna belongs among The Architects because she proved that power doesn’t require permission, rebellion doesn’t need camouflage, and survival can be louder than fear. She didn’t just push boundaries. She taught an entire generation that boundaries were negotiable.
On a personal level, Madonna has always been one of my north stars, not because she was untouchable, but because she was unrelenting. She refused the narrative that women have an expiration date in culture, and she never stops moving forward while others are being archived.
And she’s not done. Madonna just wrapped a massive world tour this past summer. Still commanding stages, still drawing crowds, still rewriting the rules she was never meant to survive in the first place.
Longevity like that isn’t nostalgia. It’s endurance and relevance.
A Moment in Time: Alanis Morissette
Moment: You Oughta Know (1995)
When “You Oughta Know” hit the radio in 1995, it didn’t arrive politely. It cut straight through the airwaves.
Girls heard it instantly, not as drama or performance, but as recognition. A woman saying what she wasn’t supposed to say, at full volume, without cushioning the truth.
The response was immediate and revealing. Men rushed to label Alanis Morissette angry and unstable. As if emotional honesty, when voiced that clearly, had to be dismissed as a flaw.
That reaction exposed the fault line. Alanis didn’t introduce female anger to music, but she brought it into the mainstream without sanding down the edges.
Her voice wasn’t smooth or restrained, it surged, cracked and doubled back. It sounded unmistakably human, and that humanity was the point. This wasn’t a character. This was a woman refusing to dilute herself for comfort.
The timing mattered. The mid-to-late ’90s marked a visible shift for women in music.
A time that would soon be reinforced by Lilith Fair, founded by Sarah McLachlan. That movement didn’t appear out of thin air. It emerged because audiences had already proven they were listening and showing up when women spoke plainly and unapologetically.
Alanis wasn’t on the Lilith Fair stage, but she didn’t need to be. “You Oughta Know” had already done the work. It dismantled the industry myth that women couldn’t lead, couldn’t be played back-to-back and couldn’t carry intensity without being softened or sidelined.
She led the pack not by organizing a scene, but by forcing honesty into the center of the conversation and leaving it there.
Deep Cut: Smiling (2020)
“Smiling” is Alanis after the fire, not during it. This isn’t the fury of Jagged Little Pill. It’s what comes after you’ve survived saying everything out loud and lived with the consequences.
The song is about healing that isn’t neat, empowerment that doesn’t perform, and strength that doesn’t need witnesses.
What makes “Smiling” an architectural deep cut is timing. In a culture that still rewards women most when they’re either furious or silent, Alanis chose something harder, emotional maturity without erasure.
She didn’t soften her voice to become palatable. She deepened it. She allowed complexity, contradiction, and calm to coexist without framing them as surrender.
The song quietly dismantles another myth that women lose relevance once they stop bleeding in public.
“Smiling” shows Alanis as an architect not just of recalibration, but of continuity. Of what it looks like to keep your emotional intelligence intact after the world has consumed your pain as content.
It proves that growth doesn’t cancel intensity, it redirects it. As a deep cut, it lands because it asks the listener to grow with her. No nostalgia. No reenactment. Just presence and that, in its own way, is just as radical as screaming.
Why Them:
Alanis Morissette belongs among The Architects because she made emotional truth a form of authority and refused to apologize for the damage that honesty caused.
Alanis didn’t posture against men, and she didn’t build a career on opposition. She stood in the same public arena and changed the rules by refusing to dilute her interior life for mass consumption.
What unsettled people wasn’t her honesty, it was her precision. She said exactly what she meant, exactly when she felt it, and allowed the audience to deal with the consequences.
The backlash revealed the fault line. Men called her unhinged. Critics questioned her sanity. As if a woman speaking plainly at full volume must be irrational by default.
But the reaction only proved her point, that women weren’t allowed to express how they really felt in public. Not loudly, and not without being punished for it. Alanis absorbed that punishment and kept going.
What makes her architectural isn’t a single album or era. It’s the permission she gave women to occupy emotional space without translation. She gave permission to feel without spectacle. Vulnerable without collapse, intelligence without softness as a prerequisite. She didn’t perform empowerment, she modeled it by refusing to clean herself up for comfort.
She didn’t vanish after the moment passed. She kept evolving and deepening rather than retreating, proving that intensity doesn’t have to calcify into nostalgia to remain relevant.
In a culture that consumes women’s pain and then asks them to disappear, Alanis stayed present, quieter at times, sharper at others, but always self directed.
Metal has always respected artists who survive their own honesty. By that measure, Alanis’s work is heavier than distortion.
She showed that truth, delivered without compromise, can move crowds, fracture assumptions, and leave lasting structural change behind.
Alanis Morissette didn’t just speak for a generation. She taught it how to listen to itself.
A Moment in Time: Taylor Momsen, The Pretty Reckless
Moment: Make Me Wanna Die (2010)
When “Make Me Wanna Die” landed, it wasn’t framed as a debut. It was a severing.
This was Taylor Momsen stepping out of a role the world had already written for her and choosing something far more dangerous, authorship. The song didn’t ask to be liked.
It didn’t explain itself. It arrived heavy, slow, and unapologetic, anchored by a voice that sounded far older than her years. Raw, smoky, and unpolished in a way that felt lived in rather than styled.
What made the moment land wasn’t shock value. It was conviction. Taylor didn’t flirt with darkness for effect, she stood inside it without posturing.
“Make Me Wanna Die” announced that she wasn’t here to be rehabilitated into palatability or novelty. She was here to inhabit rock on its own terms.
The reaction was telling. Some people tried to dismiss the song as rebellion by design, as if intensity from a young woman must be borrowed or manufactured. But the sound didn’t support that narrative.
The band was solid. The pacing was deliberate. And the voice at the center of it all carried weight, not attitude or cosplay, but gravity.
That’s what separated this moment from a genre pivot or image overhaul. “Make Me Wanna Die” didn’t introduce Taylor Momsen as a former actress trying on rock. It established her as a frontwoman willing to be uncomfortable in public and stay there.
Once that line was crossed, there was no going back to the script she’d been handed. This was the moment she chose the music and the music chose her back.
Deep Cut: Witches Burn (2021)
“Witches Burn” is Taylor Momsen claiming the word they’ve always tried to use against women and letting it scorch them back.
It’s an anthem forged from history. From the way women have been punished for visibility, autonomy, sexuality, intelligence, and refusal. The title alone carries centuries of accusation. Taylor doesn’t flinch from it. She leans in and dares the fire to finish the job.
What makes the song powerful isn’t volume, it’s restraint. The track smolders instead of exploding. Her voice stays low, steady, controlled. There’s no pleading here, no proving. Just endurance. The kind that comes from surviving public judgment long enough to stop negotiating with it.
“Witches Burn” works as a female anthem because it doesn’t ask for safety or permission. It doesn’t promise redemption. It simply acknowledges the cost and keeps standing anyway. That’s not rock rage as spectacle. That’s resolve.
For Taylor, this song marks the shift from reacting to scrutiny to outlasting it. From being watched to being unmovable. It’s the sound of a woman no longer trying to escape the label but deciding what it means. That’s architecture and thats metal af!
Why Them:
Taylor Momsen belongs among The Architects because she represents what it looks like to inherit a culture shaped by women before you and refuse to dilute it to survive.
Taylor didn’t arrive in music chasing rebellion. She arrived already marked by visibility, expectation, and scrutiny.
Growing up inside the public eye meant learning early how quickly women are reduced to surfaces, stories, or warnings.
Instead of collapsing under that weight or performing against it, she absorbed it and built something heavier in response.
What makes her architectural is her understanding that power doesn’t have to announce itself. Her voice carries grit, depth, and patience.
The sound of someone who has nothing left to prove and no interest in being palatable. She doesn’t posture as dangerous. She simply is.
Taylor stands as proof that femininity, sexuality, youth, and authority don’t cancel each other out. She didn’t reject where she came from, she outgrew it.
In doing so, she showed that women don’t have to burn their past to claim their future. They can repurpose, harden and stand on it.
In a genre that respects survival, Taylor earned her place by staying. Staying uncomfortable, honest and present long enough for authorship to take hold.
She doesn’t mimic the women who came before her. She extends them and that continuation is the point.
Taylor Momsen isn’t here because she’s the youngest. She’s here because she proves the architecture holds and keeps evolving.
I didn’t write The Architects to convince anyone that women belong in heavy music.
Women have always been here. Playing, writing, producing, touring, building scenes, holding the damn thing together from the shadows when nobody was watching.
This series exists to say the quiet part out loud. Metal is not a boys’ club and it’s not a devil factory.
It’s not a costume or a phase or a place you outgrow when you learn how to behave.
Metal is a language for people who feel deeply, think critically, and refuse to swallow neat answers. And the women, loud, soft, furious, sensual, analytical, awkward, brilliant women have shaped that language whether the history books caught up or not.
The women in this series didn’t copy anyone. They didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t wait for the room to be ready. They stood beside men, not beneath them, and put in the hard the work.
Some with instruments, some with words and some with sheer will. All of them changed the structure so the next generation wouldn’t have to break the same walls again.
If you’re a female reading this and you’re just getting into heavy music, here’s the truth nobody needs to whisper anymore.
You don’t have to choose between being feminine and being fierce. You don’t have to shrink your voice to belong. You don’t owe anyone softness to earn respect.
And if you’re someone who already loves metal, the lifers, the riff worshippers, the ones who know this music saved them, you already understand what this is about.
You’ve seen the power of authenticity. You’ve felt what happens when honesty gets loud enough to shake a room. This isn’t about rewriting history it’s about recognizing it.
Metal doesn’t need defending, it needs authenticity and the truth is, women didn’t knock on the door. We helped build the stage.
Throw your horns up if you know.
A Rip in Time: Women in Metal is A Metal Lair™ Original Series
Missed last weeks A Rip in Time: Women in Metal? Find it here.
FAQ – A RIP IN TIME: WOMEN IN METAL
Q: What is A Rip in Time: Women in Metal?
A Rip in Time is Metal Lair’s ongoing tribute to the women who’ve reshaped heavy music. Each installment spotlights a groundbreaking artist who challenged the genre’s boundaries from vocal ferocity to creative evolution, showing that metal’s history isn’t just told through distortion, but through defiance.
Q: What makes this series different?
It’s not a checklist of “women in music.” It’s a time-ripping journey through genres, eras, sounds, and revolutions. Each feature dives into how these artists rewrote their own rules, their riffs, their philosophies and their fire.
Q: Who’s been featured so far?
Each chapter covers a distinct voice in metal’s lineage. Figures like Doro Pesch, Floor Jansen, Angela Gossow, Sabina Classen, Tatiana Shmailyuk and more have been featured. With more icons and unsung heroes to come.
Q: How often does the series update?
A Rip in Time appears periodically throughout the year as new chapters are researched and written. It’s designed to evolve, not just repeat.
Q: Does Metal Lair have other series like this?
Yes! Metal Lair runs several signature series that explore every corner of heavy music:
- Seven Deadly Songs – A weekly roundup of the most unholy new releases.
- Deep Cuts – Hidden gems and lost recordings from rock and metal history.
- Metalhead Horoscopes – Weekly forecasts laced with riffs, attitude, and a lucky song for every sign.
- World Metal Weekly – A global passport through the underground, one country at a time.
- Ministry of Metal – A satirical authority devoted to the laws, rituals, and unspoken rules of heavy music. Proclamations, decrees, cultural edicts, and metal lore delivered with humor and bite.
- Metal Legacy Profiles –
Deep dive essays honoring artists who shaped metal’s sound, culture, and philosophy. These aren’t timelines or greatest-hits lists, but examinations of impact, conflict, evolution, and what each figure left behind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sabbatha Ashvale is Metal Lair’s resident wildfire in eyeliner. A music journalist and storyteller who writes like she’s swinging a torch through the catacombs of heavy music. She’s equal parts historian and shit-stirrer. Her work focuses on artistry, history, and the often overlooked creators who define metal’s evolving future. She brings depth, grit, and a razor sharp perspective to every piece she writes.