Written By Sabbatha Ashvale
Women in Metal
The Visionaries
These artists are defined not by what they endured, but by what they built through sound, space, language, and power that permanently altered the underground.
These women carved new paths through hostile scenes, rigid genres, and cultural expectations that were never built with them in mind.
Their influence lives not only in records and performances, but in the space they opened for others to follow.
What they created did not fade with trends. It reshaped the underground and expanded what power and presence could look like in heavy music.
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.
Women in Metal: Jessicka Addams – Jack Off Jill
Moment: Clear Hearts Grey Flowers (Title track – July 17, 2000)
It’s not the most obvious JOJ track which is exactly why it’s here. It’s a song that captures late-90s emotional saturation, not shock value.
Flowers crashing into the late-90s alt-metal bloodstream like a lipstick-smeared scream. Not polished or apologetic. Just raw teenage venom, self-loathing, rage, desire, and power tangled together.
Deep Cut: Angels Fuck, Devils Kiss (Sexless Demons and Scars 1997)
This is one of those tracks that refuses resolution, which mirrors the argument about messiness and discomfort while it bleeds.
As a Deep Cut, it’s doing the job of saying if you really want to understand this woman, sit with this song and don’t look away.
It’s a slow-burn wound of a track thats vulnerable, ugly and honest. The kind of song that doesn’t want to be fixed, just understood.
Why Them:
While Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill became the most visible faces of the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl movement, Jessicka Addams and Jack Off Jill carried those same feminist ideologies into hostile territory. The male dominated Florida underground. They weren’t an echo of Olympia. They were a mutation.
In 1993, Jessicka coined the term “Riot Goth,” a deliberate divergence from Riot Grrrl purism. She absorbed the politics, bodily autonomy, survivor rage, “girls to the front,” anti-abuse confrontation and injected them with something darker, dirtier, and more theatrical.
Where the Northwest leaned punk and grunge, Jessicka brought blood smudged lipstick, horror iconography, outsider menace, and a performative ugliness that resonated deeply within the goth and alt scene where the industrial, and metal adjacent kids felt alienated by punk’s purity tests.
Jack Off Jill tackled rape culture, domestic violence, and female rage with venom laced angst, satire, and abrasive performance art rather than manifesto slogans.
The message wasn’t softened for accessibility. It was in your face, messy, and intentionally uncomfortable. A method that metal has always understood more than punk orthodoxy.
Geography mattered. Removed from the Riot Grrrl epicenter, Jack Off Jill often stood alone as an all female band in Florida scenes that had little patience for feminist politics.
To be heard, they had to be louder and more extreme. They earned their place sharing stages with Joan Jett, L7, and The Lunachicks, becoming the southern torchbearers of a movement most people wrongly think was confined to Washington state.
Jessicka’s legacy didn’t end with the 90s. Her work on the 2015 AFTER GRRRL zine examined what happens to feminist punk ideals as artists age, long after the slogans fade and the industry moves on.
She also became an unapologetic plus size icon at a time when body image politics were not safe, marketable, or celebrated bringing physical autonomy into the conversation before it was fashionable.
And for those who try to reduce Jack Off Jill to shock or spectacle, their second-ever show was opening for Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, and Jessicka later performed in Manson’s side project Mrs. Scabtree, itself heavily influenced by Riot Grrrl ideology.
This wasn’t proximity to power, it was infiltration. She dragged feminist venom straight into spaces that thrived on provocation and forced them to reckon with it.
Jessicka Addams belongs in Women in Metal because she refused purity, embraced abrasion, and proved that feminist rage doesn’t need to be tidy to be revolutionary.
She didn’t ask to be included. She carved her own corridor through the underground that was sharp, bloody, and unforgettable.
Women in Metal: Selene Vigil – 7 Year Bitch
Moment: ¡Viva Zapata! (Title Track 1994)
I didn’t really pick a song here, I picked a period, which reinforces that Selene’s power was contextual and communal, not brand-driven.
This is the ¡Viva Zapata! era Seattle fury without the flannel myth-making. Punk grunge-metal crossover that sounded like fists through drywall and grief screamed directly into the mic.
Deep Cut: Dead Men Don’t Rape (Sick ‘Em 1992).
There is no other correct answer here. And it can’t be romanticize. It’s framed for what it is, a blunt instrument.
This still hits like a brick to the teeth. No metaphors. No softening, just rage, truth, and exposing rape culture.
Calling it a Deep Cut isn’t about rarity. It’s about cultural discomfort. This song still lands like a crime scene photo people don’t want to look at. That makes it essential.
Why Them:
Selene Vigil does not belong to the mythology of the early 1990s Seattle scene, she belongs to its scar tissue.
As the frontwoman of 7 Year Bitch, Selene emerged alongside Riot Grrrl and grunge, but her work was never about slogans or scene politics. Where others debated ideology, Selene dealt in lived consequence.
Her approach to punk was visceral, stripped of irony or posturing and rooted in survival rather than theory. This wasn’t feminism as a brand, it was feminism tempered under pressure.
7 Year Bitch formed in 1990 as an all female band in a scene that still carried deep misogyny beneath its progressive veneer. Sound familiar?
Their sound was blunt, uncompromising, and deliberately unpolished. Refusal to soften rage into something more digestible. Selene’s voice didn’t perform anger, it documented it unfiltered.
That honesty was sharpened by tragedy. The band’s 1992 debut Sick ’Em was dedicated to original guitarist Stefanie Sargent, whose death that year ripped a hole through Seattle’s tight knit underground. Loss wasn’t an abstract theme for 7 Year Bitch, it was present and inescapable.
Then came the murder of Mia Zapata of The Gits in July 1993 in Seattle after being sexually assaulted and strangled while walking home. It was a moment that permanently altered the trajectory of Selene’s work. Mia wasn’t just a symbol, she was a close friend, mentor and peer.
Jesus Mezquia, a man who had committed several sexual assaults in the area was later found and convicted in 2004. The motive wasn’t ideology or hatred of punk or Riot Grrrl, it was the same brutal, banal violence that women navigate every day.
In the aftermath, Selene and 7 Year Bitch became central figures in the Home Alive movement, a musician led response focused on self-defense education and awareness for women navigating unsafe environments.
Their second album, ¡Viva Zapata! (1994), was not a tribute wrapped in nostalgia, it was a raw act of communal grief and fury.
The song “M.I.A.” confronted the injustice head-on, refusing distance or poetic abstraction. And “Dead Men Don’t Rape” remains one of the most uncompromising songs of the era.
It’s a statement so direct it still makes people uncomfortable decades later. No metaphor or soft edges. Just rage, truth, and refusal to look away.
Selene’s presence on the 1996 compilation Home Alive: The Art of Self-Defense cemented her role not just as a musician, but as a participant in a broader fight for safety and agency. This was music as action, not aesthetic.
After 7 Year Bitch disbanded in 1997, Selene continued working on her own terms. Her solo albums That Was Then and Tough Dance carried the same grit and honesty, stripped of band mythology but no less sharp.
Even when she stepped away from the spotlight to work outside the industry, appearing in documentaries, releasing archival live recordings she never abandoned the reality her music came from.
Selene Vigil represents Women in Metal through heaviness without artifice. She proved that women didn’t need theatrics, polish, or permission to be confrontational, bombastic, and emotionally devastating.
Her work stands as a reminder that some of the heaviest music ever made wasn’t born from ambition or image but from grief, anger, and the refusal to stay silent. This is legacy tbrough evidence.
Women in Metal: Susan Janet Ballion – Siouxsie and the Banshees
Moment: Juju (1981),when atmosphere became weaponized. Cold, ritualistic, predatory. A blueprint for gothic metal, doom, post-punk, and every shadow-dweller who followed.
This choice quietly legitimizes her inclusion in metal without ever saying “metal” out loud. That’s confidence.
Deep Cut: Halloween (Juju 1981), a hypnotic and unsettling. A song that crawls under your skin and rearranges the furniture.
Why Them:
While Susan Janet Ballion, better known as Siouxsie Sioux, is most often categorized under post-punk or gothic rock, her influence on heavy metal, particularly for women, is vast and enduring.
Long before metal fully articulated its darker emotional and atmospheric extremes, Siouxsie was already operating in that territory. She did not stand adjacent to heaviness. She helped define its emotional language.
Though never a metal vocalist in the traditional sense, the Banshees frequently achieved a sonic density that rivaled heavy metal itself.
Early reviews of Nocturne in 1983 coined the phrase “Banshee Metal” to describe the band’s aggressive wall of sound guitars and Budgie’s tribal, punishing drumming.
Working with guitarists such as John McGeoch and Robert Smith, Siouxsie helped pioneer a cold, flanged, minor-key distortion style that later became foundational to gothic metal and the more atmospheric branches of black metal. The tension and menace that metal would later codify were already present in her work.
Siouxsie also shattered expectations of how women could occupy darkness on stage. She did not perform vulnerability or seduction.
Her presence was commanding, aloof, and fierce in its refusal to explain itself. She sang about nightmares, power, dread, and the macabre, offering a blueprint for women who wanted to be theatrical without being ornamental.
Artists such as Cristina Scabbia have cited the Banshees as a cornerstone of gothic metal atmosphere. Myrkur’s shifts between feral intensity and spectral melody echo Siouxsie’s dynamic control.
Doro Pesch emerged from a European scene already shaped by the DIY defiance and visual authority Siouxsie normalized. Shirley Manson has stated plainly that she learned how to sing by listening to The Scream and Kaleidoscope.
Siouxsie’s influence was not rooted in activism as slogan or manifesto. It was subversive by existence alone. She refused the role of sex symbol and instead turned fetish and bondage aesthetics into armor, transforming the stage into a site of power rather than consumption.
As part of the Bromley Contingent during the first wave of UK punk, she proved that command did not require virtuosity or institutional training.
Her first performance at the 100 Club was improvised, a radical act that dismantled barriers for women who had been told they were not qualified to begin.
Even her chosen name reflected this refusal of conformity. By abandoning Susan Ballion for Siouxsie Sioux, she rejected a default Western identity in favor of something deliberately othered and confrontational.
Her reach extended far beyond her own scene. Massive Attack later sampled “Metal Postcard,” a song inspired by anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield, for the film The Jackal, underscoring her lasting impact on industrial and heavy electronic music.
Siouxsie Sioux belongs among Women in Metal: Visionaries because she authored the emotional architecture that heavy music still inhabits.
She showed that heaviness could be elegant, controlled, and terrifying without excess. She did not follow a genre, she gave it its shadow.
Women in Metal: Ruth McArdle – Lords of Acid
Moment: The Voodoo-U (1994) era industrial, acid, sex, sweat, and provocation turned into a club weapon. Not subtle. Not interested in subtle.
Lust would’ve been the obvious grab but Voodoo-U is where control, dominance, and repetition fully lock in. It’s where Lords of Acid stop being novelty and become a force.
Deep Cut: I Sit On Acid. Minimal, hypnotic, filthy. A masterclass in repetition as seduction. The ultimate sex metal playlist track.
Why Them:
Ruth McArdle stands at the point where industrial, electronic body music, rave culture, and metal aggression collided and became something dangerous, sexual, and undeniable.
While Lords of Acid began as a studio-driven project under Praga Khan, it was Ruth who transformed it into a living, confrontational force. She did not simply front the band. She embodied its identity.
Joining during the Lust era in 1991, Ruth became the voice behind defining tracks such as “I Sit on Acid” and “Rough Sex,” songs that fused hypnotic repetition with brute physicality.
More importantly, she gave Lords of Acid a visual and performative presence that could not be ignored. Onstage, she was commanding, detached, and unapologetically dominant.
Sexuality was not offered for approval. It was wielded as control. That presence turned Lords of Acid from a studio experiment into a touring powerhouse, especially during their first major U.S. runs, where their reputation truly detonated.
Her departure from the band has often been reduced to rumors of jealousy involving a male co-singer, but the reality is more structural and far more revealing.
The friction centered on creative control and ownership. Praga Khan maintained strict authority over the Lords of Acid project and brand.
As Ruth’s popularity grew and she became inseparable from the band’s public identity, that balance of power shifted.
What followed was not a personal dispute but a clash over authorship and visibility. Ruth was ultimately pushed out, and the band entered a revolving-door era of vocalists, reinforcing the idea that the role she defined was treated as replaceable rather than foundational.
The irony is that many listeners felt the opposite. For a significant portion of the audience, the soul of early Lords of Acid was inseparable from Ruth’s voice and presence. When she left, something essential left with her.
Ruth did not disappear. She formed Sextoy, a project that leaned even harder into industrial-metal intensity and sexual confrontation.
It was a clear statement that she was not a hired component but a creator with her own vision.
Later discussions of a reunion in the 2000s surfaced briefly and collapsed just as quickly, reportedly undone by the same control issues that had driven her out in the first place.
Ruth McArdle belongs among Women in Metal: Visionaries because she reshaped how power, sexuality, and aggression could coexist in heavy music.
She bridged club culture and metal without diluting either. She proved that eroticism could be tempered rather than consumed. And she demonstrated that identity, once created, cannot be erased simply by replacing the face attached to it.
Women in Metal: Chrissie Hynde – The Pretenders
Moment: Pretenders (the debut album 1980) Razor-sharp songwriting wrapped in sneer, hooks, and restraint. Tough without theatrics. Dangerous without volume wars. This isn’t about hits. It’s about authority arriving fully formed.
Deep Cut: Mystery Achievement (Pretenders 1980). Nervy, coiled, and tense. Punk attitude with precision instead of chaos.
Why Them:
Chrissie Hynde stands as one of the clearest examples of resilience through unwavering commitment to vision.
Her career is not a story of sudden arrival or cultural permission. It is a study in persistence, patience, and authority built over time.
From the start, Chrissie existed as an outsider. Growing up in suburban Ohio, she did not fit the expectations placed on young women of her era.
She was obsessed with the British Invasion and deeply aware that she wanted a life in music long before she had access to a band, a scene, or a path forward.
That longing did not turn into bitterness. It became fuel. She did not achieve mainstream success until 1979, when The Pretenders released their debut and she was 28 years old, an age the industry at the time considered past the window for a first act.
Chrissie proved that timing is not about youth. It is about readiness. Before that breakthrough, she did whatever was necessary to stay close to music.
She moved to London with little money and no safety net. She worked as a house cleaner, waitress, shop assistant at Malcolm McLaren’s boutique, and even as a music journalist for NME.
She understood the industry from the inside and the margins. She knew how stories were framed, how narratives were shaped, and how easily women were dismissed. That knowledge became part of her armor.
Her resilience was tested early and brutally. In her early twenties, she endured a period of extreme violence involving a motorcycle gang in Ohio.
She has spoken openly about being robbed and assaulted during that time. Rather than allowing that experience to define or silence her, she reclaimed control.
The toughness required to survive those environments translated into a stage presence that was unflinching and self-possessed.
Songs like “Tattooed Love Boys” stand as artistic reckonings, not confessions. They are acts of ownership.
Chrissie also redefined what leadership looked like for women in rock. She refused the role of decorative frontwoman and insisted on being the band’s leader and rhythm guitarist.
She did not dress to soften herself or invite approval. Her androgynous style projected competence, not availability. She demanded to be treated as a musician first, and she never compromised on that position.
Beyond performance, Chrissie’s strength lay in her ability to build and shape a band. She has often described her greatest skill as orchestration.
She knew the sound she wanted and waited until she found the right players to execute it.
When tragedy struck and she lost both her lead guitarist and bassist to drug-related deaths within a short period, she did not retreat.
She regrouped, rebuilt, and released Learning to Crawl, an album that includes some of the most enduring work of her career.
Chrissie Hynde belongs among Women in Metal: Visionaries because she exemplifies unapologetic authority.
She did not wait for acceptance or permission. She built her own structure, set her own rules, and sustained her vision across decades of resistance, loss, and change.
Her strength was never performative. It was structural and her legacy is not survival alone. It’s endurance, and control maintained on her own terms.
The women featured in The Visionaries shaped sound where none existed, claimed space where none was offered, and rewrote power on their own terms inside scenes that rarely made room for them.
Their influence is not confined to genre labels or timelines. It lives in atmosphere and posture. They gave others permission to be loud, confrontational, theatrical, erotic, intellectual, furious and controlled,
These women did not inherit the underground. They altered it.
They bent its architecture and widened its corridors so others could follow. In doing so, they created a scaffolding of lineage that still holds the weight of heavy music today.
A Rip in Time: Women in Metal exists to document that lineage and preserve it without apology.
A Necessary Note
What hits hardest isn’t just that so many women in metal have written about rape culture. It’s how little the core problem has shifted, even as decades pass, scenes evolve, and language grows more polished. The riffs get heavier. The production gets cleaner. The conversations become more “aware.” And yet the same violations repeat, wearing new disguises.
Metal didn’t invent this obsession with power, control, and violation. It reacted to it. Women in heavy music, in particular, used this space because it was one of the few places where rage, disgust, and refusal could exist without being immediately neutralized. When Selene screams it. When Jessicka weaponizes ugliness. When Siouxsie turns dread into architecture. They are not recounting trauma for spectacle. They are documenting a system that keeps reproducing itself.
Sex trafficking sits at the extreme end of the same continuum. It is not a separate horror. It is the logical conclusion of a world that treats bodies, time, labor, and desire as resources to be extracted. When exploitation feels like violation, that is not metaphor run amok. It is the stripping of agency. The enrichment of one party through the depletion of another. Different mechanisms, same damage.
This series centers strength, authorship, and vision. But naming power also means acknowledging where power is abused. Silence does not protect anyone. Information does.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, abuse, or exploitation, help is available. You are not alone, and support exists beyond scenes, subcultures, or music.
United States resources:
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE (4673) Online chat available at rainn.org
National Human Trafficking Hotline: 888-373-7888 Text BEFREE to 233733
The U.S. Department of State can also help victims abroad connect with local support services through embassies or consulates.
International support and help-finding resources
International support and help-finding resources
•NO MORE Global Directory – A comprehensive international directory of domestic and sexual violence hotlines and support services by country. Search to find support in your region.
•Together for Girls / Brave Movement – Global advocacy and community aiming to end sexual violence and support survivors worldwide.
•Our Rescue – Global organization working to end sex trafficking and exploitation and support survivors.
•Panzi Foundation – Supports survivors of sexual violence with holistic care, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (example of focused survivor support).
If you are in the United Kingdom & Ireland
•Rape Crisis Support – National helplines and crisis services in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland via local Rape Crisis centers.
Support communities and networks
•me too. International – A global movement and resource platform for survivors of sexual violence support and healing.
•1in6 – Support and community for men who experienced sexual abuse or assault.
If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services (e.g., 911 in the U.S., 112 in much of Europe).
If you aren’t sure where to start, the NO MORE Global Directory can help point you to a hotline, shelter, or support organization in your country.
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.