Salt Lake City has a women-in-music problem. Not a shortage of talent. A shortage of documentation. The women who built this scene — who played the rooms, ran the shows, started the labels, held the infrastructure together — are dramatically underrepresented in the written record. This is an attempt to fix that.
The 1960s: Where the Line Starts
The Clingers are the beginning. Four sisters from Orem — Diane, Marian, Peggy, and Paula — who became one of the first all-female rock bands in America. They played nationally televised shows. They put out records. They did it in the early 1960s, before most of the country had decided women could be in rock bands at all.
That's not a footnote. That's a founding chapter.
The 1990s: Sweet Loretta and the Scene that Held
If you were in Salt Lake in the 1990s and paying attention, you heard Sweet Loretta. Phenomenal front woman. The kind of performer that scene veterans still bring up unprompted, thirty years later. Some bands get famous. Some bands become the scene itself. Sweet Loretta was the scene.
That era also gave us Less Than Never and the Debi Graham Band — early 2000s all-girl punk that held the door open so the next generation could walk through. Melissa Chilinski and Carol Gnade weren't performers; they built infrastructure. Trash Moon Collective. Women's Redrock Music Festival. The scaffolding that let other women have careers.
Not every hero holds a guitar.
The 2000s: From the Suburbs to the World Stage
Three sisters from Magna. SHeDAISY went platinum. The Whole SHeBang sold over a million records. Two sisters from Draper — Meg & Dia — played Vans Warped Tour, signed to Warner Bros., and wrote "Monster," which hit millions of streams before most people knew what streaming was.
The Aces came out of Provo — four childhood friends who pushed back against the "girl band" label from day one. Red Bull Records. Billboard charts. "We're a band. Period." They were right.
SubRosa deserves its own paragraph. Rebecca Vernon, Sarah Pendleton, Kim Pack. Doom metal with dual electric violins. Internationally acclaimed. Heavy as the Wasatch Range itself. The kind of band that makes people fly from other countries to see them play a 200-cap room in Salt Lake.
Mindy Gledhill was doing something completely different and equally massive. Indie-folk. International charts. "Anchor." "Crazy Love." Tens of thousands of records sold, quietly, without the machinery that usually generates those numbers.
The Current Wave
Talia Keys & The Love. Baby Ghosts. Little Moon — who won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest from SLC. 4.PLAY. Doli. The Alpines. Blissify. Rachael Jenkins. Wynona Tanis. Always Her.
The Death by Salt compilations documented this wave before it had a name. Detzany. Marqueza. The Ph03nix Child. Josaleigh Pollett. R&B, electronic, pop-soul, Latin pop, indie — not one lane, all of them at once.
This is the current state of women in SLC music: wider, deeper, and more genre-diverse than any previous generation. And still underrepresented in the record.
March 28, 2026
International Women in Music Day. Leatherheads. Magda Vega opens. Shrink the Giant brings the power. Willöh — three women, punk meets '60s aesthetic, Battle of the Bands winners at JRC Presents on February 21, 2026 — closes the night.
The Clingers would have been in the front row.
The tradition continues March 28.
International Women in Music Day show details →