"We're trying to start a movement where it's back to where it used to be," Shepherd told Radio.com. "It didn't matter what you looked like, what your gender is, where you're from, what you do for a living. It's an emotion. It's about rocking the f*** out!"

Rocking out is something that both Shepherd and fellow Butcher Baby Carla Harvey know a lot about. They also know a little something about having to explain their love for the overtly masculine genre.

Harvey said she was teased, threatened, chased home from school, and had her hair pulled for loving metal music. "I'm half black, I grew up in a black neighborhood, I wasn't supposed to like heavy metal," Harvey explained. "At all!"

"And to make matters worse, of course, I was a girl," she said. "Everything about it was wrong. I had to fight for the right to love my metal."

Because of that, whenever someone makes comments about her and Shepherd being women in metal, she just turns the other cheek. "You have no idea what I went through," Harvey said. "I'm from Detroit. I got beat up for this. Your words can't hurt me."

Similarly, Shepherd grew up in an environment that was not quite metal friendly."I grew up in a very large Mormon family, in Provo, Utah, where this music is not accepted," she said. "And I wasn't accepted either because I wasn't like the Mormon kids who went to church. I wasn't like that at all."