Pop music is sung from the diaphragm, rock is sung from the heart, and metal is sung from the balls.

It’s long been a fusion of deep growls, heavy distortion, and buckets of testosterone. But now there are a few inked-up ladies who can melt faces too. Metal may have been a man’s world, but the women on these pages are blowing the boys’ long hair back. * “A lot of people don’t believe that I am the main songwriter of Eyes Set to Kill, and it’s only because I am a woman,” says Alexia Rodriguez. “My sister, Anissa, and I have always had our hearts in metal music. I guess it’s just the tough times we went through that made metal and heavy rock seem to speak our same language. The more aggressive and emotional a band was to me, the more I could relate.” * For DJ Ivy D’Muerta, gender used to be a source of insecurity. “During my first show on Sirius XM Liquid Metal I was a nervous wreck,” she says. “I knew the listeners would be like, ‘Who in the hell is this beach town chick thinking she knows a thing or two about metal?’” But as these women have discovered, the best way to meet those kinds of comments head-on is to crank the amps to 11 and drown them out. * On these pages, we’ve rounded up the six hottest, loudest, most talented chicks in the metal scene and put them on center stage.