On 2 October 2002 a small Montreal label, Galy Records, released a debut, and two singers share its microphone.
Founded in January 2002, signed to Galy within months, credited ever since as one of the pioneers of deathcore alongside Antagony and The Red Chord, and remembered now for the two men who fronted it from 2004 onward, the Montreal band whose first record put the blast beat and the breakdown in the same songs before the genre had settled on a name is Despised Icon, and the voice beside Steve Marois on Consumed by Your Poison belongs to Marie-Hélène Landry. Ten songs that snap the strings off a borrowed bass and stamp a rehearsal room's linoleum down to the concrete. The Canadian monthly Exclaim!, reviewing the record that December, singled out the vocals for a range of sounds well beyond the usual growl. Landry sang with the band until 2003. The history of women in deathcore can start there, on the first record of one of its founding bands, at the microphone, doing the job.
Female fronted deathcore bands make up a short roster next to the genre's headliners, and on records by Winds of Plague, Make Them Suffer and their Orange County forerunners in Bleeding Through, the seat a woman held was the keyboard rack, with a clean voice wired in beside it. The test is the one any player gets: the register, the technique, the part on the record. The wider story of the genre's bands, from the Montreal founders to the orchestral wave, has the account that frames it.
Female deathcore singers, from Montreal to Shreveport
Founder in 2004, in Montreal, of a band first called Tempest, signed under its new name to Century Media in 2007 and the voice on its first three albums, the singer who carried a death growl and a clean melody in one throat across Once Only Imagined is Alissa White-Gluz, and the band is The Agonist. The album came out on 14 August 2007. The video for Business Suits and Combat Boots was voted the sixth best of that year on MTV2's Headbangers Ball, the network's weekly metal show. The band is filed as metalcore and melodic death metal more often than as deathcore, and its claim to a place among deathcore singers rests on the vocal method, not the shelf. On deathcore's own ground the claim is beyond dispute: she recorded guest vocals on No Light Shall Save Us, from Carnifex's World War X, released by Nuclear Blast on 2 August 2019.
She parted with The Agonist in 2014, the year Arch Enemy announced her as its new singer. Vicky Psarakis took the microphone that March, sang on Eye of Providence in February 2015 and held the job until The Agonist broke up in May 2023. Two singers, one microphone, one band.
Formed in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2007 by a guitarist, Steven Bradley, who heard a growl he wanted to build a band around, signed to Century Media by 2008 and filed in its own encyclopedia entry as mathcore, metalcore, experimental metal and deathcore all at once, the band that swung from blast beat to breakdown to a lounge interlude inside a single song was Iwrestledabearonce, and the growl belonged to Krysta Cameron. It's All Happening came out on 2 June 2009 and went to number one on Billboard's Heatseekers chart, the list for new artists.
Picture the television in a club's back office with its remote crushed under a bass cabinet, the buttons jammed so the set flips channels on its own every few seconds, a jazz hour, a weather map, a slasher film, a fiddle contest, all at full volume and none of it waiting for permission: that is an Iwrestledabearonce song, and the growl and the breakdowns are what keep the whole thing from flying off the wall bracket. In October 2009 the band took that set across Europe on the Impericon Never Say Die club tour, on a bill with Despised Icon and Oceano.
Cameron left the band in the summer of 2012, partway through that year's Warped Tour. Taken on at a tour representative's suggestion, the singer on the band's last album, Hail Mary, released by Artery on 16 June 2015, is Courtney LaPlante. She left after the record came out, and the band she founded afterward, Spiritbox, lives outside the genre.
Female deathcore bands and the keyboard seat
Before the word settled, Orange County had already put a woman at the keyboard of a hardcore band driving a bridgehead into death metal territory. Molly Street, at the keyboard since 2000, played on Bleeding Through's debut Dust to Ashes, released in 2001, and in the early 2000s Marta Peterson, now Marta Demmel, took over the seat, which she has held ever since apart from a gap in the mid 2010s. The keyboard is what drew the black metal comparisons to a metalcore band. Guitarist Scott Danough put the case for the instrument plainly: it added an element the rest of the scene did not have. Demmel's keyboards are on This Is Love, This Is Murderous in 2003.
Released by Century Media on 11 August 2009, built by Johnny Plague's band around the symphonic layer that set it apart in the vanguard of deathcore's first bands, The Great Stone War by Winds of Plague credits its keyboards and its clean vocals to a single player, Kristen Randall, who had joined in 2008 and was making her recording debut with the band. She said on 14 October 2009 that she was leaving, and she was gone within days.
Think of the yellow rubber cable ramp laid across the service road behind a festival main stage, run over all weekend by catering trucks and box vans until its hinges are flattened and the rubber splits along every seam, and the cables inside it still carrying every channel to the front of house desk when the headliner walks off: that is a keyboard pad under a deathcore breakdown, crushed on every downbeat and still holding the chord when the drop is over. Pull the cable out and the PA goes quiet. Pull the keyboard out of The Great Stone War and the orchestra Johnny Plague built the band on goes with it.
The seat did not stay empty. Alana Potocnik took the job in 2009 and kept it until 2017, and her keyboards are the credited ones on Resistance, produced by Will Putney and released on 29 October 2013. The next to take the rack was Adrienne Cowan, who joined in 2017 and played keyboards and sang backing vocals on Blood of My Enemy, released on 27 October 2017. In Boston four years earlier she had founded Seven Spires with Jack Kosto, singing lead and playing keyboards.
Formed in Perth in 2008, turned loose on Roadrunner in May 2012 with Neverbloom, the band that runs its piano and its clean voice from the keyboard seat is Make Them Suffer. Louisa Burton, in the seat from 2011, played keyboards and piano and sang the clean parts on Neverbloom and on Old Souls, released in May 2015, where the reviewer at New Noise picked out the piano signature and the backing vocals as strong points the band should lean on harder.
Burton left in June 2017, weeks before Worlds Apart came out on Rise on 28 July, and Booka Nile was announced on 9 June to finish the record. Wall of Sound wrote that the band had "unearthed a gem in the creative talents of Booka Nile". She stayed for How to Survive a Funeral, released on 19 June 2020, which reached number 17 on the Australian albums chart, and the band announced her departure on 24 February 2022.
Pull the keyboard out of The Great Stone War and the orchestra Johnny Plague built the band on goes with it.
Female fronted deathcore bands and their neighbours since the 2010s
Formed in South Wales in 2015 by a singer who had fronted the hardcore band Wolf Down and a guitarist, Ash Gray, out of Brutality Will Prevail, launched that year with a demo EP called Defy the Tyrant and signed to Prosthetic for a debut album, Animus, on 14 October 2016, the band that sits right on the line between death metal's riff and hardcore's floor is Venom Prison, and the voice is Larissa Stupar's. The band is filed as death metal with hardcore and grindcore worked into it, and the reason to hear it beside deathcore is mechanical: the riff runs at death metal speed and the song lands on hardcore's floor.
A gas-powered cut-off saw going through a steel bike rack bolted to the pavement outside a venue sounds like that, the blade shrieking at full revs through the tubing for as long as the riff lasts and then the last leg of the rack snapping and the whole frame dropping onto the concrete in one slam, which is the breakdown.
The song that started the band came back five years later. Primeval, released on 9 October 2020, gathered the early material and recorded it again, and Defy the Tyrant got a new official video from the 2020 sessions. Erebos followed on Century Media on 4 February 2022.
Formed on New Year's Day 2019 in Hertfordshire by a singer, a guitarist and a drummer who had walked out of an earlier band together, put on the map that April by a self-released single, Elite, with a guest vocal from the then singer of Thy Art Is Murder, and signed to Napalm, the alternative metal band that has toured with deathcore acts is Vexed, and the singer is Megan Targett. Meyrick de La Fuente of Exist Immortal produced the debut, Culling Culture, which came out on 21 May 2021. Negative Energy arrived on 23 June 2023, and by January 2024 the band was on the road across Europe with Cabal, then back out in March and April supporting Carnifex.
Vexed's own channel carries a series of one-take vocal videos, Megan Targett singing a whole song in one pass and posting it as it came out, Anti-Fetish among them.
The coach and the credits
Melissa Cross, the vocal coach who built the Zen of Screaming program for heavy metal singers, teaches distortion a singer can sustain without fear of injury, and in July 2025 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Contemporary Commercial Music Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah University. The growl, in her method, is a technique like any other. That is the mechanical argument, made by someone who teaches it.
| Musician | Role | Band | Years | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Molly Street | Keyboards | Bleeding Through | 2000 to 2003 | Dust to Ashes (2001) |
| Marta Demmel | Keyboards | Bleeding Through | Early 2000s to 2014, 2017 to now | This Is Love, This Is Murderous (2003) |
| Marie-Hélène Landry | Vocals | Despised Icon | 2002 to 2003 | Consumed by Your Poison (2002) |
| Alissa White-Gluz | Vocals | The Agonist | 2004 to 2014 | Once Only Imagined (2007) |
| Krysta Cameron | Vocals | Iwrestledabearonce | 2007 to 2012 | It's All Happening (2009) |
| Kristen Randall | Keyboards, clean vocals | Winds of Plague | 2008 to 2009 | The Great Stone War (2009) |
| Alana Potocnik | Keyboards | Winds of Plague | 2009 to 2017 | Resistance (2013) |
| Louisa Burton | Keyboards, piano, clean vocals | Make Them Suffer | 2011 to 2017 | Old Souls (2015) |
| Courtney LaPlante | Vocals | Iwrestledabearonce | 2012 to 2015 | Hail Mary (2015) |
| Vicky Psarakis | Vocals | The Agonist | 2014 to 2023 | Eye of Providence (2015) |
| Larissa Stupar | Vocals | Venom Prison | From the band's start | Animus (2016) |
| Booka Nile | Keyboards, piano, clean vocals | Make Them Suffer | 2017 to 2022 | Worlds Apart (2017) |
| Adrienne Cowan | Keyboards, backing vocals | Winds of Plague | 2017 onward | Blood of My Enemy (2017) |
| Megan Targett | Vocals | Vexed | 2019 to now | Culling Culture (2021) |
None of it is a trend. The record shows the microphone and the keyboard rack on releases from 2001 to 2023, on Century Media, Roadrunner, Rise, Prosthetic and Napalm, in Montreal, Orange County, Shreveport, Perth, South Wales and Hertfordshire. The parts are on the records, credited, and they do structural work: the second voice, the clean melody, the orchestral part. The same test applies on the stages of bands like Lorna Shore, Suicide Silence and Whitechapel.
