A growing number of female-fronted bands are redefining the sound and culture of Southern Maine’s music community.
Pretty much any weekend, Maine’s music venues will offer live music fans a smorgasbord of kick-ass rock shows, featuring everything from three-chord punk bands to jazz-inflected art rock combos to classically influenced death metal outfits, and everything in between. But whatever show you go with, the odds are good that at least one of the acts on the bill — and truth be told, probably more — is going to feature a woman fronting the band.
Not all that long ago, the local music scene in southern Maine seemed to be a boys club. And, make no mistake, there are still plenty of men doing their thing in greater Portland and beyond. But scan the live-music listings in the Bollard’s weekly email or the PortlandNoise Insta feed and it becomes clear: There’s a burgeoning cadre of talented women fronting rock acts around town these days. Bands like Euphemia, Vices Inc., Sorrowfuse, Viqueen, Misery Whip, Red Eft, Alma June & the Persian Cats, Bait Bag, and ADLT GRRL, to name but a few, are all fronted by hard-rockin’ musicians who just happen to be women, and all of them are making a name for themselves as solid acts that consistently deliver top-drawer rock action.
Dev Atwood, who’s been hosting the Music from 207 show on Portland’s WCLZ 98.9 FM for more than a year now, says that just a few short years ago, it seemed like women on stage, let alone out front, were a novelty, not just locally, but nationally, as well.
No longer.
In fact, there are so many female-fronted acts working the clubs and putting out compelling new music that she recently put together an episode of her show featuring some of the best local bands fronted by women.
“In the past, acts like Vixen or The Runaways weren’t taken seriously. They were a novelty,” Atwood said. “It doesn’t feel like a novelty anymore, and, right now, the propulsion of female-fronted music in Portland is so visceral, you can feel it zooming past you. It’s all around, and it can’t be ignored.”
Nor should it, she says, given where we are both culturally and politically in the country right now — a feeling borne out by the experiences of the women on the front lines in the local scene (and you might have noticed it during the Grammys this year, too).
Gina Brown, the lead singer for Portland’s Euphemia, has been playing gigs in Portland for more than a decade. In the past year or so, though, Euphemia seems to have hit its stride. The band spent the summer playing a series of high-profile gigs to growing audiences, and their debut, self-released record, Euphemia, was recently called out by Bull Moose, with eight stores throughout the state, as the top-selling record by a Maine band in 2024.
On stage with Euphemia, a five-piece outfit that trafficks in a powerful, garage-band snarl, Brown exudes a confidence in the material and her ability to deliver the goods that demands attention from even the most casual observer.
But Brown says the notion that a woman can write and perform hard rock music as well or better than a man still comes as a surprise to some with astonishing regularity, even if it doesn’t happen as often as it used to.
Portland’s music scene, Brown said, is strong and very supportive of artists regardless of gender, “but I’ve had men come up to me after a show and say, ‘Hey, sweetheart, that was pretty good, who writes your songs?’ They have a hard time believing that it’s me.”
Alexa “Lex” Rae and Courtney Cavanagh are a married couple who together constitute one half of Viqueen, a righteous thrash/hardcore ensemble that arrived in Portland via Austin, Texas, and the Bay Area back in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. The Portland scene, they said, is fertile ground for women who want to rock.
“There’s a lot of bad-ass women in Maine,” Lex said, “and it makes it more natural that they’ll get into it. Maine is punk as shit. There’s just a good scene here, a great hardcore scene. In bigger cities it can be kind of a boys-club vibe.”
By way of illustrating that point, Cavanagh recalled a show they played back in California, before landing in Maine.
“We got a lot more shit about being women on the west coast,” she said. “There was a show we played in San Jose, in this tiny, little shithole bar, they didn’t even have a stage, and some guy was like, ‘Hey, who’s this? The Dixie Chicks?’ We changed our set around and started with the heaviest stuff we had, and later on, he changed his tune. It’s nice to be able to back it up.”
Thankfully, she said, that kind of thing hasn’t really happened in Maine.
“The scene in Maine is in such a good place right now,” Lex said, “and that can be such an empowering thing for women.”
Laura Cowie, the lead singer of southern Maine’s Sorrowfuse, said the response to their progressive hard rock sound has been overwhelmingly positive, as well, among both men and women. That said, though, more than a few women have reached out to her after shows to let her know that the lyrics she writes and the songs the band puts together have connected.
“I think it’s a sign of the times,” Cowie said. “Women are feeling liberated to break out and not be constrained by genre.”
And it is precisely that lack of constraint that speaks to the increase in bands fronted by women.
Paul Gauer, who curates the Maine Brews & Music Reviews Facebook page, said he’s seen the number of Maine acts led by women spike from around 25 percent to nearly 50 percent in the last year or so.
And that’s not just good for women; it’s good for music in Maine as a whole.
“There absolutely has been an increase in the number of female solo acts, as well as female-fronted acts, in the post-pandemic years,” Gauer said. “Women are working across all genres, and nothing is off limits, and the more diverse the Maine music community becomes, the stronger it will be.”
