Butcher Babies’ Heidi Shepherd Says She Wasn’t Aware of Women in Metal Growing Up

These days, there are a number of women leaving their mark across the metal scene in various ways but it wasn’t always such. In an interview discussing Butcher Babies‘ new releases, singer Heidi Shepherd discussed her earliest influences as a singer and reveals that it was not usually women, because she hadn’t heard women in metal before (via Blabbermouth).

“I was more into like Flyleaf and Evanescence and stuff. But then when I heard the screaming, I was more of like a fan of males in metal because that’s what I had grown up with. I had seen that. So I grew up in kind of like Korn and Slipknot and Limp Bizkit. So I wasn’t really driven by like other females in metal. But granted, my band is named after the first female to really grace this beautiful genre, which is [Plasmatics’] Wendy O. Williams. And she had the song ‘Butcher Baby’. But I didn’t actually know about her as a kid either. I found out about her as an adult and really fell in love with and was inspired by the person that she was, standing up against the patriarchy of just, like, women are supposed to sound a way, women are supposed to be this way, women are supposed to dress and sound a certain way. And to me, Wendy went out there and she just defied all odds with the utmost power, which is actually the attire the Butcher Babies first started with, which was the nipple tape and everything was what Wendy O. wore. So I would say that, throwing it back to that, but I wasn’t even, I wasn’t really introduced to a lot of females in metal as a kid — unfortunately.”

Shepherd started Butcher Babies with Carla Harvey in 2010, so hopefully women growing up today feel like they have strong role models in the scene. She probably still thinks Doja Cat is more metal than you.