Kittie

Kittie was once dismissed as cartoonish (one critic called them "Josie & the Pussycats in Hell"), but the band has since colored outside the lines enough to silence the detractors.

Pierced, dyed, and pissed off, the femmes fatales of Kittie screeched and growled their way from Canada to MTV shortly after graduating high school. The group's gold-selling debut, 2000's Spit, became the most impossibly good teen-metal debut since Death Angel's The Ultra-Violence, which dropped when these disconsolate women were still in diapers. Kittie's second album, last year's Oracle, saw the band almost completely jettison the experimental elements that made its predecessor an instant classic. That disc and this year's "Safe" EP find a slightly altered lineup screaming, pummeling, and blast-riffing as fiercely as any dudes ever have.