An all-girl tribute to Metallica’s thrash-metal years. THE four members of Misstallica huddled on a squat concrete staircase outside Asbury Lanes, a scrappy, punk-theme bowling alley and music hall a few blocks from the boardwalk here. As the band rested between sets on a recent Friday night.

Misstallica is a member of a growing array of all-girl metal tribute acts that routinely sell out rock clubs in New York and beyond, establishing acumen (and chops) in a business that often favors men.

When the Misstallica women finally reassumed their instruments at the bowling alley that Friday, the crowd  mostly grown men in black T-shirts proclaiming allegiance to Motörhead, the Misfits, Tool was borderline ecstatic. One fan, wearing jean shorts and a sleeveless, tucked-in Beavis and Butt-Head top, was so possessed by the squall that his body appeared to be operating independently of his mind. A few feet away the vocalist and guitarist Gina Gleason, 19, tall and sinewy in black skinny jeans and flat boots, ripped into “The Four Horsemen,” from Metallica’s 1983 album, “Kill ’Em All.” Her brown hair was flailing; her teeth were bared.

Ms. Gleason, a virtuosic guitarist and untiring vocalist, has mastered the frenzied, muscular gnashing of the Metallica front man, James Hetfield, and the band’s second set, like the first, was a spectacular thing to behold: along with the drummer, Kaleen Reading, 19; the guitarist Lauren Tsipori, 16; and Ms. Tarnoff, 26, Misstallica played harder, faster and better than the words “tribute band” might imply.

Before the show, the band mates posed for photographs in their dressing room, crowding onto an orange loveseat. A lone can of aerosol hairspray sat in front of a mirror; a single pair of women’s underwear hung limply from a string of Christmas lights. The scene recalled the showy heyday of ’80s metal a subculture largely untouched by feminism, in which women were often seen as hangers-on, writhing on the hoods of cars or perched on their boyfriends’ shoulders. For Misstallica “groupie” means something different: intimidated, deferential and male.

All-female tribute bands are often curiously good at appropriating a genre long considered misogynistic. Metal’s reputation as a vehicle for male aggression is partly true, but there’s also an undeniable femininity to its archetypal presentation (long flowing hair, tight pants) and, in many cases, to the music itself. 

In Los Angeles, the Iron Maidens  five women playing songs by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden  routinely exhilarate Sunset Strip crowds. The drummer, Linda McDonald points to Iron Maiden’s “Maiden Japan,” an EP recorded in 1981, as her primary inspiration. “I just fell in love with it,” she said. “It’s a live album, and it’s just so tight and so energetic. I’d never heard anything like it.”

In a 2005 article in Spin, Chuck Klosterman suggested that Lez Zeppelin — an all-girl Led Zeppelin tribute, which performs on Saturday at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, on Long Island — might be “the most powerful all-female band in rock history.” Mr. Klosterman’s sentiments aren’t particularly hyperbolic. Lez Zeppelin, from New York, has somehow harnessed the energy, a kind of magical looseness, that helped catapult Led Zeppelin into the rock ’n’ roll canon. 


The Lez Zeppelin band, from left, Megan Thomas, Shannon Conley, Leesa Harringtoh-Squyres and Steph Paynes in Fairfax, Va., last June.