For over a decade, she served as one half of the ferocious metal vocal duo fronting the LA heavy metal-based band Butcher Babies. Now, stepping into the solo spotlight for Butcher Babies’ most daring album to date, Shepherd opens up about surviving a stifling religious upbringing, battling inner demons, and fearlessly baring her soul to the world.
Listen to the opening of NIGHTBLOOM, the phenomenal new record from Butcher Babies and undeniably their best work to date, and you can actually hear the ground shift beneath you. It happens on the very first track, Lost in Your Touch. Before the crushing guitars kick in, before the drums shatter the silence, when there is just a breathtakingly beautiful singular opening lyric: “Does she get lost in your touch like I do?”
Butcher Babies
It’s a startlingly intimate question, and a massive departure from the face-melting aggression the band built their formidable reputation on. But for frontwoman Heidi Shepherd, that vulnerability isn’t some calculated creative choice; it’s the sound of a fearless artist tearing down every boundary that ever held her back.
The first thing that strikes me about Shepherd is that she possesses a real warmth and is, despite her many years in the cut-throat music business, refreshingly down-to-earth. And this is never clearer than when I ask her about the stunning opening track. Heidi explains, “With that opening, you know what you’re getting into with this album,” her voice radiating sincerity. “You know it’s going to be a personal type of, ‘Oh, we’re digging in here. Buckle up.’”
NIGHTBLOOM marks a monumental era for Butcher Babies. It is their first record since the departure of co-vocalist Carla Harvey. Recorded without the safety net of dual vocals for the very first time, Shepherd was left to carry the emotional weight of the vocal duties entirely on her own shoulders. Yet, she wasn’t in isolation, as she stepped into the studio alongside her bandmate and partner, guitarist Henry Flury, and the album became a total rebirth for the band. It acts as a searingly honest autobiography of a woman who, at 41, is finally unafraid to confront her darkest demons, addressing her trauma with raw, unfiltered bravery.
The catalyst for this evolution arrived after Shepherd navigated an exceptionally bleak chapter in her life, culminating in a decision to begin therapy for the first time in her late thirties. Grappling with a mental space so dark that she experienced thoughts of no longer wanting to be here, it was only after starting these sessions that she began writing the album. The intense process of unpacking her past provided the volatile emotional fuel for NIGHTBLOOM.
“I attribute all of that to therapy,” she notes. “I didn’t necessarily have a full outlet for all of these emotions and suppressed memories. I was flooded with all of this emotion, and I knew I needed my outlet to be my music.”
Writing alongside Henry Flury, the creative process became an exercise in absolute artistic liberation. Stripped of all previous restrictions, the pair locked themselves in their studio and let the floodgates fly wide open. “It would just spill out of me,” she says of typing the lyrics in those intensely private sessions. “It would spill out of me onto the keyboard, and it was in that moment where I was like, I’m feeling these emotions, writing these songs. I have to let it out, I have to do this.” The result is a breathtaking, emotionally heavy record that bleeds signature Butcher Babies aggression into genuine melodic vulnerability.
No track exemplifies this quite like Black Clouds Over Georgia. A musically daring departure featuring a trap beat, a country influence, and an unrelenting guitar solo from Henry Flury that converses directly with the vocals, the song forced Shepherd to revisit the exact moment her first marriage ended. Growing up in the strict Mormon Church, Shepherd was forced into a mould that never quite fitted. Married in the Mormon temple at a staggeringly young age, a union she knew in her gut was wrong, her divorce at twenty was viewed as an unforgivable failure.
“In the religion that I grew up in, a divorce was looked at as just… you don’t do that,” she says. “I remember telling my mom, like, ‘Maybe I’ll just have a baby and that’ll fix the relationship.’ Things that I look at now and I’m like, oh man, that would have been the worst idea ever. But I remember just thinking, ‘I can’t fail.’ Now, looking at it, those broken pieces led to so many beautiful things in my life.”
During those oppressive early years, Shepherd survived by running. A fiercely talented track-and-field athlete who competed in the Junior Olympics and ran on her college team until breaking her back, running became her physical escape while heavy metal became her spiritual sanctuary. She recalls taking the keys to her college running track at night, pulling her car up to the fence, leaving the headlights on, and running in endless circles while clutching a skipping Discman playing Linkin Park. “I would just let all the emotion out by myself at night on that track with my headlights just on me,” she remembers.
That instinct to turn to music for survival bleeds into every corner of NIGHTBLOOM. Music saved her from a severe eating disorder in the band’s early days. “I knew that if I had continued, I would not be able to sing,” she admits. “It was damaging my vocal cords. It was damaging everything… that is what gave me the courage and the ability to quit… doing what I was doing to my body.”
It also pulled her back from the abyss of December 2019, a period chronicled on the gut-wrenching live favourite, Last December. “There were just thoughts of not being here anymore,” she confesses. What gave her the will to live during that dark time were recurring, nightly dreams of being on stage, a visceral reminder of her purpose. “Every night I had the exact same dream of being on stage,” she recalls. “And that literally reminded me of my purpose and reminded me that I’m supposed to be here. There’s still more for me to do.”
When she performs that older track live today, the arenas fall completely silent. Back in the vocal booth for the new material, legendary producer Howard Benson guided Shepherd to bleed a little more onto the page. The result is a collection of fierce survival anthems like Black Dove, the heaviest track on the album, where she fearlessly declares: “You said I’d break, but I’m still here.”
She isn’t merely surviving anymore; she is commanding her own story and offering a lifeline to her audience. Far from being triggered by reliving her trauma under the spotlight, she embraces the catharsis. “I really, truly believe that when I get to play these songs live, it’s just another form of my therapy,” she explains. “And so, when I’m up there singing these songs, it’s turning these negative experiences into something positive, and it offers these beautiful new memories.”
Butcher Babies
This profound connection was vividly apparent on a recent European tour, where she spotted a fan who had been relentlessly throwing down, circle-pitting and moshing with wild abandon. But when the opening notes of Lost in Your Touch rang out, everything changed. Shepherd initially thought something was wrong in the pit because his friends were suddenly holding him up. Shepherd assumed he had an injury as he was sobbing uncontrollably, yet whilst he was visibly bawling his eyes out, it was the emotion of the track that hit him and led to the outpouring of emotion.
After the song finished, Shepherd looked right at him from the stage and asked if he was okay, to which he shouted back, “Yes! Thank you!” Later, he approached the merch booth to explain that the song meant the world to him, and the moment she sang it, he just felt it completely.
“I knew in that moment when I saw him, that we were healing together,” Shepherd says, her voice catching with emotion. “No one is immune from that emotion. I think it’s just changing my show from being like, melting faces to maybe glueing them back on.”
By standing on stage and singing her deepest traumas aloud, she is quite literally giving her fans permission to feel, an unspoken assurance that it is okay to hurt, and that they are understood. It is a profound connection that Shepherd embraces completely. “I love that… permission to feel,” she reflects warmly. “Yeah, and I feel it when they look at me and they get me and they understand. Hearing their stories when they come up to the merch booth… anytime I feel like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s a lull in the set, maybe we should keep it upbeat,’ I’ve got those several people that come up afterwards and tell me their story. It’s just like, we’re all here together.”
She talks of the band’s reinvigorated energy, of the unadulterated joy of locking eyes with Henry Flury on stage, and of taking NIGHTBLOOM on the road in 2027. She speaks not as a veteran of the metal scene, but as an artist entirely unburdened and ready to fly.
“I do feel like this is a rebirth for us,” she declares. “This Butcher Babies has been reborn. We are almost viewing this as a debut album, even though it’s not. I feel like I have a new lease on life. It’s like it’s a new band in its infancy. We’re still babies.”
With NIGHTBLOOM, Heidi Shepherd has forged her pain into armour. Fearless, resilient, and utterly authentic, she has created a sanctuary in the heavy metal landscape, a place where she, and every single fan listening in the dark, finally has permission to feel.
Interview with Heidi Shepherd of Butcher Babies by Louise Phillips — September 2026.
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