this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I believe BlackLace formed around a year or so before Warlock, though they both released their debut albums in '84 (I'm not sure which was actually released first, but I think it was Warlock). BlackLace had a demo album floating around before that, but nothing official.
There's also Girlschool who released their first album in 1980, with a great cover of Race With The Devil.
Later did some stuff with Lemmy from Motörhead as well.
I think finding "the first" of anything when it comes to bands and genres like these is impossible to answer definitively.
Sexism was a pretty big factor in why many female bands never came out from underground.
That and also the "hard rock vs. heavy metal" argument, which I tend to stay away from.
I think it's fair to say Warlock is the first majorly successful female-fronted metal band, but there's always been stuff happening that doesn't hit the airwaves or get more than a small, niche group of followers.
They are the ones I usually find, but for me everything there screams "rock, not metal", but maybe that’s just me (after all I’d also say that about some Black Sabbath stuff, so it’s very clear I have no idea what I’m talking about)
Ohh, nice, I had never heard of them before. That actually sounds kinda cool.
Yeah, wikipedia agrees. Though there was Snakebite, Doro’s first band which got founded yet another year before BlackLace :D But they never released anything but a demo, so I’d say they don’t count and BlackLace gets the honor indeed :D
Boy, do I believe that.
CALL OF THE WIIIIIIIIILD! Damn, now I got that stuck in my ear :D
Lol, nah. Everyone just has their own perspective on what makes something "heavy enough" to be heavy metal.
As extreme metal got more, well, extreme (also the name of a hair metal band, ironically) audiences grew to have different expectations.
It's funny, actually. There was a time when thrash was "too extreme". Then the next extreme subgenre and then that subgenre's subgenre and that subgenre's subgenre's subgenre.
Now Metallica is "too tame" for some people.
It's all pretty arbitrary, IMO.
No one can even agree on what the first metal song was. Was it Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf or something by Sabbath or Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin? Was it Helter Skelter by the Beatles?
Ask the internet and everyone says something different.
As long as we enjoy what we listen to, that's all that really matters.
Lol, maybe. But I'm sure they were both preceded by some random woman who sounded amazing, took to the stage and killed it, and we'll never hear her voice or learn who she was. We'll probably also never hear the real first heavy metal song that some random band probably played in a pub and annoyed the shit out of everyone.
Hah. I'm glad you like it. I know you mentioned you don't like traditional metal, but just in case you or anyone else is interested, Marta Gabriel from the band Crystal Viper (Witch's Mark for a sample song) did an entire tribute album for a bunch of lesser known female artists/one hit wonders from the '80s, including Call of the Wild. It's not all that different from the original (only real difference is the addition of some male vocals), but you can hear more of Doro's influence on her as well.
Edit: This comment got longer than I expected. Apologies! (Also, I hope it only shows up once because I was getting an error submitting it at first.)