Written By Sabbatha Ashvale
Women in Metal: A Rip in Time – The Sovereigns
Women who didn’t ask for permission, they built the throne.
Let’s get something out of the way early. Women don’t need permission to exist in metal. They don’t need validation, quotas, or a special lane. They belong beside men, not under them.
A Rip in Time: Women in Metal is a reminder of that fact, told through women who didn’t shout for attention or bend the genre to fit them. They showed up and played hard as fuck.
Jo Bench . Cristina Scabbia . Fernanda Lira . Courtney Love . Maria Brink
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 Rip in Time: Women in Metal. Five artists. Five ruptures. One genre forever altered.
Women in Metal: Jo Bench, Bolt Thrower
Moment: The IVth Crusade – The IVth Crusade (1992)
This is the record where Bolt Thrower locked into their definitive war march sound, and where Jo’s bass stopped being “support” and became command.
The low end is dense, martial, and immovable, not flashy, not ornamental. It announces her role as the band’s anchor and proves, in no uncertain terms, that she isn’t present in Bolt Thrower, she’s structural.
If someone understands this song, they understand Jo Bench.
Deep Cut: Cenotaph – Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness (1989)
Early, raw, and absolutely punishing. This is Jo before polish and before legacy. When the bass tone is uglier, more physical, and welded directly to the riff.
It’s a deep cut not because it’s obscure, but because it shows how early she was already doing the thing others would spend decades chasing,weight, discipline, and gravity.
This track makes it clear she didn’t grow into authority. She arrived with it.
Why Them:
It was the late ’80s. The death metal scene wasn’t hostile, it was indifferent. If you couldn’t play, you were invisible.
There was no spotlight when Jo Bench walked into death metal. No applause. No narrative. Just a bass, a rehearsal room, and a scene that would crush you if you couldn’t hold your ground.
Joining Bolt Thrower in 1987, Bench became the unshakable low end foundation of one of the most disciplined and respected bands extreme metal has ever produced.
Not as a novelty or a guest, but as a permanent, immovable force. She appears on every full length from In Battle There Is No Law! to Those Once Loyal, her bass functioning less as embellishment than infrastructure.
Bolt Thrower was a band obsessed with war, not glory or chaos, but machinery. Orders. Advance. Attrition. That rigidity wasn’t a turn-off for Bench. She fucking wanted it.
Her playing mirrored the band’s ethos perfectly. Mechanical, martial, and unyielding. No flourish or indulgence. Just pressure applied with absolute intent. In a genre addicted to excess, she proved that control could be just as sexy.
Her sovereignty lies in refusal to be marketed, framed, or explained. Bench declined spectacle and solo press, letting her presence speak through tone alone.
She didn’t soften the band’s identity or stand apart, she reinforced it. Bolt Thrower didn’t “make room” for her. She fit because she already belonged there.
Her origin story has passed into underground lore. She was taught the set in days, not weeks, and she was ready when it mattered. That is the only currency death metal has ever respected. No symbolism was required though symbolism followed anyway.
For countless women watching from the underground, Bench became proof that you didn’t need to perform femininity to exist in extreme music. You didn’t need armor, costumes, or permission. You needed discipline, conviction, and sound that could not be ignored.
Jo Bench didn’t kick the door open. She aligned herself with the machine and made it heavier. That is sovereignty.
Women in Metal: Cristina Scabbia, Lacuna Coil
Moment: Heaven’s a Lie (Comalies 2002)
When Heaven’s a Lie unfurled, it didn’t arrive kicking or clawing, it seduced.
Cristina Scabbia sang like she already knew the outcome, like the truth had been whispered long before the first note bled into the room. Her voice moved through the song the way smoke curls around candlelight. Deliberate, unhurried, impossible to ignore.
This wasn’t power in the traditional metal sense. No chest beating or theatrics. It was intimacy sharpened into dominance. Control masquerading as calm.
In a scene that still expected women to either snarl or soften, Scabbia chose something more dangerous, confidence.
Heaven’s a Lie didn’t ask you to believe. It waited patiently until you already had.
Deep Cut: Falling (Lacuna Coil 1998)
Before the iconography, before the polish, there was falling inward. Falling feels like a private transmission, unfinished in the best way, still trembling at the edges.
Cristina Scabbia doesn’t perform here so much as confess, her voice hovering between fragility and resolve, as if she’s discovering its power mid-breath.
There’s no command yet, no throne, just gravity. The kind that pulls without warning. You hear the hunger, the uncertainty, the quiet ferocity forming beneath the surface. This is a voice learning how to hold weight, how to descend without breaking.
If Heaven’s a Lie is sovereignty, Falling is the descent that made it possible. The moment before the wings hardened.
Why Them
Cristina Scabbia belongs in this series because she didn’t just survive metal’s boys’ club. She quietly rewired it from the inside.
When Cristina emerged with Lacuna Coil in the late ’90s, heavy music was still deeply uncomfortable with women who didn’t fit a single approved role. You could be decorative. You could be extreme. You could scream. You could disappear. Cristina refused all of it. She showed up articulate, composed, powerful, and unmistakably heavy, without turning herself into a caricature to earn permission.
Her voice became a new kind of weapon. Not just aggressive, not just melodic, but controlled and emotionally literate. She proved that clarity could be just as devastating as chaos. That strength did not require ugliness, and femininity did not cancel authority. That alone shifted the terrain.
Cristina also broke ground simply by being visible without apology. She spoke intelligently in interviews at a time when women in metal were either fetishized or ignored. She represented metal on mainstream platforms without softening it or herself. She stood as a frontwoman who led with conviction instead of spectacle, and fans followed.
Most importantly, she expanded what was possible. She opened a lane for women who wanted to be heavy without erasing themselves, who wanted longevity instead of shock value, who wanted presence instead of permission.
Cristina Scabbia didn’t ask for space. She occupied it calmly, consistently, and on her own terms. That is why she belongs here.
Women in Metal: Fernanda Lira, Crypta
Moment: From the Ashes (Echoes of the Soul, 2021)
When From the Ashes hit, it wasn’t framed as a comeback, it was a severing.
Lets take a step back. Fernanda Lira was the founding member and long-time front figure of Nervosa for nearly a decade.
In 2019, she was abruptly dismissed from Nervosa along with drummer Luana Dametto. The split was public, messy, and very visible in the metal press. That was Fernanda Lira’s career rupture.
Instead of fading, she formed Crypta with former members of Burning Witches and Hate Eternal.
Fernanda Lira didn’t step into a spotlight, she tore a new one into existence.
Her voice carried no residue of compromise, no need to contextualize why she belonged there. It was already decided.
What makes this moment land isn’t conviction, speed or brutality. It was certainty. The sound of someone who burned the old structure down quietly, then walked forward without looking back. Extreme metal didn’t crown her. It had to recalibrate around her.
Deep Cut: Death Arcana (Echoes of the Soul 2021)
This is where the teeth really show. Death Arcana doesn’t rush, it stalks. Lira’s delivery is ritualistic, controlled, almost ceremonial, like she’s reading fate aloud rather than shouting into chaos.
The rage is there, but it’s disciplined. Weaponized calm. If the moment was rebirth, this is dominion. The sound of knowing exactly how hard to press the blade.
Why Them:
Fernanda Lira was publicly removed from her own band. She didn’t disappear, she formed a new extreme metal band and fronted it with growls and harsh vocals doubling down on heaviness.
That band didn’t crawl back into the scene. It walked straight onto major stages, including Wacken Open Air, and built real, global momentum with the odds stacked firmly against her.
No explanation tour. No victim narrative. No apology arc. That’s not a comeback, that’s fortitude.
Women in Metal: Courtney Love, Hole
Moment: Violet (Live Through This 1994)
The song is not abstract rage. It’s specific, intelligent, and cutting.
It draws heavily from Love’s relationship with Billy Corgan, but it doesn’t stay confined there.
What makes Violet endure is how it expands personal damage into a broader indictment of power imbalances, sexual exploitation, and the quiet violence embedded in “romantic” dynamics.
Violet is where Courtney Love stopped translating herself for comfort. Written in the shadow of exploitation, resentment, and a deeply unbalanced romance, the song refuses softness. It drags desire, power, and sexual politics into the open and lets them decompose under direct light.
Love’s voice doesn’t seek absolution, it challenges narrative control. Romance curdles into confrontation. Beauty becomes a threat. What begins as longing ends as refusal.
In a culture eager to reduce her to scandal, Violet stands as proof of authorship: precise and unflinchingly self-aware. This wasn’t chaos. It was articulation sharpened into defiance.
Deep Cut: Old Age (Single: Credit in the Straight World 1994)
“Old Age’ exists in two parallel early ’90s realities: as a Nevermind-era outtake from Nirvana, later surfaced officially, and as a raw 1992 demo-era incarnation of Old Age through Hole, each reflecting radically different emotional architectures built on the same skeletal idea.”
Old Age exists in a strange and delicate space. The music began as an unreleased Nirvana outtake written by Kurt Cobain, but what Courtney Love did with it is the point.
She took the bare structure and rewrote it completely, reshaping the song around her own words, her own gravity, and her own interior world.
Her voice sits low and exposed, carrying resignation, distance, and emotional fatigue rather than accusation. It feels lived-in, as if the song has already survived something before you hear it.
The most powerful versions are the early recordings released on the Credit in the Straight World and Violet singles.
These takes are intimate and unpolished, closer to a confession than a finished product. Later demos may be cleaner, but they lose the ache that gives the song its weight.
Old Age matters because it quietly dismantles a familiar narrative. It is not borrowed power. It is not proximity. It is authorship.
Courtney Love took something unfinished and made it her own without explanation or defense. That discipline, and that confidence, is where the song’s power lives.
Why Them:
Courtney didn’t just enter alt-rock, she poisoned the room for complacency. She brought female rage that wasn’t palatable, wasn’t metaphor-heavy, and wasn’t designed to be consumed neatly. She refused the cool-girl contract.
Surrounded by conspiracy culture, abandoned by people who should have defended her, and cast as a villain without evidence, Courtney Love kept writing. That persistence through immense stress and grief is what gives her music its voltage.
Her music and lyrics are powerful because she refused containment. Nothing was diluted or p explained away.
Women in Metal: Maria Brink, In This Moment
Moment: Whore
When Whore landed, it wasn’t provocation for its own sake. It was a seizure of language. Maria Brink took a word designed to shame and destabilize women and rebuilt it on her own terms, stripping it of its power to wound and forcing it to mean something else entirely.
What made this moment stick wasn’t volume or outrage, it was ownership. Brink didn’t reject the gaze placed on her, she repositioned it.
Sexuality became choice, not obligation. Exposure became structure, not surrender. The song operates less like a confession and more like a declaration of jurisdiction over her own image.
In a genre that still prefers women to either hide or perform innocence, Whore refused both.
It asserted that femininity, sexuality, anger, and command could coexist without apology. Metal didn’t have a template for that level of self-possession. So it had to watch it happen in real time.
Deep Cut: The Promise (2013 single)
The Promise is a deep cut not because it was hidden, but because its original shape never fully materialized. The song was initially written as a duet for Maria Brink and Ivan Moody, envisioned as a volatile push-and-pull between two dominant voices.
That version never happened. Label politics intervened, and the collaboration was quietly shelved before it could be recorded.
What remains is not a compromise, but a ghost of intent. The released version features Adrian Patrick, and it leans hard into emotional extremity.
Obsession, devotion and danger. This is not romance as salvation. It is romance as collision. Brink’s performance carries authority rather than submission, matching intensity without surrendering control.
What gives The Promise its long tail is the version that never was. The unrecorded Ivan Moody duet lingers as negative space, a reminder of how often women’s creative visions are redirected, reshaped, or diluted before reaching the surface.
Instead of chasing that loss, Brink absorbs it. The song stands anyway, heavy with intention and unresolved tension.
For those who dig past the surface, The Promise reveals something essential about Maria Brink’s catalog. Power doesn’t require perfect circumstances. Sometimes it survives in spite of them.
Why Them:
Maria Brink is often described as a trailblazer, but that word barely covers the disruption she introduced. She didn’t just expand what women were “allowed” to do in heavy music, she exposed how artificial those limits were to begin with.
Harsh vocals, melody, spectacle, sexuality, ritual, vulnerability. Brink refused to choose a single lane, and metal had to adapt.
Her influence is measurable, not symbolic. Peers cite her because she redefined the terms, not because she softened them.
Onstage and behind the scenes, Brink has consistently centered women in positions of power from tour management, merchandising and performance roles. Treating representation as infrastructure rather than branding.
What makes her approach difficult to flatten is her refusal to separate feminism from sexuality. Brink has never treated the two as opposing forces. Instead, she treats sexuality as agency, not performance.
Her most infamous provocation, Whore, was never shock value for its own sake. By reframing the slur as an acronym, Women Honoring One Another Rising Eternally she reframed accusation into reclaiming language that was designed to erase women’s complexity.
Earlier in her career, Brink felt pressure to armor herself in traditionally masculine hardness to be taken seriously. That phase passed.
What followed was something more subversive. The confidence to choose when and how femininity appears, or to remove it entirely.
On Ritual, she deliberately pulled back on sexual imagery, not as retreat, but as proof. Power didn’t disappear. It concentrated.
Brink frequently speaks about the “divine feminine,” drawing inspiration from figures like Queen Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc, not as saints or symbols, but as strategists, survivors, and leaders.
That lineage matters. Her work doesn’t ask permission to be contradictory. It insists that contradiction is the point.
She may not always lead with political labels, but her actions are unambiguous. Control of image. Control of language. Control of the stage. Maria Brink didn’t reclaim a stereotype. She exposed who benefits from it and stepped outside its reach.
There is no single sanctioned path through metal for women who refuse containment.
Jo Bench walked into extremity without spectacle or explanation, anchoring one of death metal’s most uncompromising bands through sheer presence and longevity.
Cristina Scabbia altered the emotional temperature of heavy music through control and atmosphere never needing slogans to prove authority.
Fernanda Lira chose fortitude over silence, building something heavier and louder when disappearance would have been easier.
Courtney Love endured suspicion, cruelty, and erasure, yet kept writing with a voice sharp enough to scar the culture that tried to flatten her.
Maria Brink seized the frame itself, turning language, spectacle, and accusation into tools she controlled rather than endured.
None of them followed an approved route. They didn’t soften to survive or conform to be accepted. They walked the path less traveled where boundaries matter more than approval and metal is irrevocably heavier for it.
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.