The women who wrote the soundtrack of a generation aren’t done yet — not even close.
There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when a musician you grew up with walks back out onto a stage. It’s not nostalgia exactly — it’s something more electric than that. It’s the recognition that the voice that helped you survive high school, or a bad relationship, or the specific particular misery of being twenty-three, is still out there in the world, and that it still has something to say.
2025 and 2026 have turned out to be remarkable years for exactly this kind of moment. Across the rock landscape, women who defined the ’90s and early ’00s — women who were told, implicitly or explicitly, that their moment had passed — are making records, announcing tours, and in some cases giving the best performances of their careers. Here’s a look at who’s back, what they’re up to, and why it matters.
1. Shirley Manson & Garbage — Back With Their Best Work in Decades
If you need proof that a rock band can hit their stride in their fourth decade, look no further than Garbage. Garbage’s eighth album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, was released in May 2025 and was supported by a North American tour beginning in September 2025. Wikipedia Critics noticed: the album received a metascore of 80, with NME’s Liberty Dunworth giving it a perfect score and calling it a record where the band “welcomes a brighter new chapter” and displays “some of their most profound songwriting to date.” Wikipedia
The backstory behind the album is one of rock’s best comeback narratives of recent years. In the past two years, Shirley Manson went through two separate hip surgeries — including a full replacement — after an injury sustained during a 2016 onstage fall. She was bedridden at points during the album’s creation, and the fog of depression began to creep in. Rolling Stone Rather than let it consume her, she leaned into something unexpected: hope. “I don’t have to be young, I don’t have to be fast, I don’t have to be sexy, I don’t have to be appealing, I don’t have to smile,” she told NME. NME Coming from the woman who once fronted rock’s most gloriously sardonic band, that statement hits like a power chord.
The album’s release also came with a side story that tells you everything about the cultural moment around female artists in rock: a Daily Mail article about Garbage’s comeback led with a headline calling the band “unrecognisable” and focusing on their appearance rather than the new music. Manson took the tabloid to task on Instagram, calling the headline out directly. Loudwire Her response was widely shared, celebrated, and very, very Shirley Manson.
2. Amy Lee & Evanescence — A New Album, a Star-Studded Tour, and a Creative Peak
A new Evanescence album will arrive in 2026, confirmed singer Amy Lee. The LP will mark the follow-up to 2021’s The Bitter Truth, and the gothic rockers will hit North America with support from Spiritbox and Nova Twins from early June through early August. Consequence
What makes this comeback particularly exciting is the creative momentum behind it. Evanescence shared two new songs in 2025 — “Afterlife” and “Fight Like a Girl” with K.Flay — and Lee also collaborated with Poppy and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante for the song “End of You,” which was named Loudwire’s pick for the Best Metal Song of 2025. Loudwire That’s a singer not coasting on legacy plays, but actively burrowing into the most vital corners of heavy music right now.
The tour announcement came as Evanescence hit a new stride: in 2025, the band joined Metallica on a stadium tour, opened for heavyweight acts like My Chemical Romance and Halsey, and unleashed powerful new singles. As Amy Lee put it: “We have really tapped into something special.” Rolling Stone
The tour lineup itself is a statement. Spiritbox, Poppy, K.Flay, and Nova Twins will serve as support on select dates — something Lee described with genuine enthusiasm: “I’m very excited to be touring with such amazing women and bands.” Rolling Stone Four of the most compelling women in contemporary rock music, on one bill, with one of the most influential female voices of the early 2000s. That’s a night to remember.
3. Alanis Morissette — Touring the World Like She Never Left
Following a sold-out show at the O2 Arena and a career-defining set at her first-ever Glastonbury appearance in 2025, Alanis Morissette has announced a return to the UK and Ireland for a summer 2026 run, headlining Crystal Palace Park in London on July 4th. Indie is not a genre She will be joined on the UK/Ireland dates by Skunk Anansie — fronted by Skin, herself one of the most magnetic performers of the same era — making for a double bill that’s basically a masterclass in what women in rock can do.
Let’s take a moment with that Glastonbury detail. Morissette is a seven-time Grammy Award winner whose 2025 world tour sold over half a million tickets. Alanismorissetteconcerttour Jagged Little Pill, released in 1995, remains one of the defining artistic statements of its decade — not just in rock, but in popular culture broadly. Thirty years later, the songs still sound like emotional detonation devices. “You Oughta Know” still makes rooms vibrate with collective catharsis. “Ironic” is still being debated in linguistics classes. “Hand In My Pocket” remains one of the most perfectly constructed pieces of contradictory self-awareness in pop music history.
What’s remarkable is how Morissette’s cultural stock has only risen with time. The Broadway adaptation of Jagged Little Pill earned 15 Tony nominations. Her anniversary tours have consistently outsold contemporaries. And she’s now appearing alongside younger acts who grew up listening to her, creating a generational through-line that very few artists ever get to experience in real time.
4. Flyleaf & Lacey Sturm — The Reunion That Actually Happened
Flyleaf have announced a 20th anniversary tour with original singer Lacey Sturm. The July 2026 US outing marks the band’s first since reuniting with Sturm in 2023, running from July 8th in Atlanta through July 31st in Anaheim, California. Consequence
This one matters. Sturm left Flyleaf in 2012 after nearly a decade fronting one of Christian rock’s most crossover-successful bands. Her departure left a void that was never quite filled, and the band largely retreated from mainstream rock. When she reunited with the band at Sick New World in 2023, the reaction was enormous — a reminder of how deep the emotional connection between Flyleaf fans and Sturm’s voice runs.
Following scattered festival appearances in 2025 at Louder Than Life, Rocklahoma, and Boardwalk Rock, the 2026 tour marks Flyleaf’s first proper full run since 2016. Revolver Magazine The self-titled debut album the tour celebrates — the one that gave us “I’m So Sick” and “All Around Me” — was one of the genuine breakout moments for women in early-2000s hard rock, and there’s a whole generation of fans who never got to see Sturm sing those songs live. July 2026 is their chance.
Flyleaf’s appearance at Welcome to Rockville 2026 in Daytona Beach will see the band celebrating that 20th anniversary of their platinum self-titled album Respect My Region before the headlining tour begins — making this summer a genuine landmark moment for anyone who called themselves a Flyleaf fan.
5. Courtney Love — A Documentary, New Music, and a Very Courtney Comeback
This one is complicated, chaotic, and utterly fascinating — which is to say, it’s perfectly on-brand. 2026 seems set to be the year that Love returns to the spotlight as a musical artist. Antiheroine, a new retrospective documentary by Edward Lovelace and James Hall that traces her life, career, and the making of a new solo album, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Louder The documentary follows Love over five years in London as she works on her first new music since 2004.
Love sparked speculation of a full Hole reunion in early March when she posted a cryptic video of former bandmate Melissa Auf der Maur set to Hole’s 1998 hit “Malibu,” captioning it, “So do we tell the kids about the tour?” iHeart The internet promptly lost its mind. Love then clarified: no Hole reunion, but she and Auf der Maur would be “playing some shows, new songs” together. NME
Love commented that the tour would feature “Died Blonde 2026 new songs. Not ’94.” BrooklynVegan Which is, honestly, the most Courtney Love possible response to the question of whether she’s doing a nostalgia tour.
The new solo album — the long-awaited follow-up to America’s Sweetheart — has been two decades in the making. An official synopsis for the documentary describes Love as “now sober and set to release new music for the first time in over a decade.” Louder Whether the music lands or not, the sheer cultural gravity of Courtney Love re-entering the conversation is significant. She remains one of the most important and misunderstood figures in rock history, a woman whose contributions to alternative music were consistently undersold by a press that preferred to focus on her personal life rather than her art.
6. Hayley Williams — Solo, Collaborating, and Everywhere
Paramore’s Hayley Williams has spent the years since their 2023 album This Is Why doing what she does best: absolutely refusing to sit still. In 2025, Williams released her third solo album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, under her own independent label, Post Atlantic. She also provided vocals on the Turnstile track “Seein’ Stars” and collaborated with Moses Sumney. Wikipedia
What’s striking about Williams’ current arc is the depth of her creative fingerprints across the rock landscape. Williams appeared in the 2025 documentary Every Time You Lose Your Mind about alt-rock cult heroes Failure, and she will be appearing on their new album in 2026. Louder Press materials describe her as “an artist whose longtime public admiration for Failure has unquestionably helped introduce the band to an entirely new generation of listeners.” That’s not a celebrity cameo — that’s a musician engaging deeply with her influences.
Williams came up in the early 2000s as a teenager with a voice that didn’t fit any of the boxes being offered to women in rock at the time — too pop for emo, too raw for pop. She created her own category. Twenty years on, she’s still creating her own categories, this time on her own label, on her own terms.
7. Sleater-Kinney — Still the Most Important Band You Might Not Know
For anyone who cares deeply about the history of women in rock, Sleater-Kinney are foundational. Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker built one of the most critically revered bodies of work in American indie rock across the ’90s and ’00s, and they’ve refused to stop evolving.
Their most recent album, Little Rope (2024), was written in a place of mourning after Brownstein’s mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident while vacationing in Italy. It’s described as one of the finest, most delicately layered records in their nearly 30-year career, veering from spare to anthemic, catchy to deliberately hard-turning. The Columbian
The album received some of the best reviews of their career, and the duo has continued touring, building an audience that spans the riot grrrl era through today’s independent rock generation. Brownstein’s parallel career as a writer and actor (Portlandia, her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl) has introduced Sleater-Kinney to listeners who might never have found them otherwise, and many of those new listeners have been going backward through one of the deepest catalogs in rock.
8. The Ones Still Keeping Us Waiting (But Worth It)
Not every great ’90s and ’00s woman in rock has stepped back into the spotlight yet — but the waiting is meaningful too.
PJ Harvey remains one of the most singular artists in rock history, and while she hasn’t released new music since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, her influence is everywhere in the current generation of left-field rock. Each new Harvey album, whenever it comes, is an event.
No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani has spoken warmly about the possibility of reuniting with her ska-punk bandmates, though no formal announcement has been made. The Tragic Kingdom generation still holds out hope.
And while a full Hole reunion remains definitively off the table for now, the news that Courtney Love is making new music and will perform it live with Melissa Auf der Maur is closer to a comeback than anyone expected twelve months ago. The door is open, even if it’s only cracked.
Why It Matters
There is a particular cruelty built into the music industry’s relationship with women: the window of acceptable relevance has always been narrower, the penalties for aging louder, the cultural pressure to step aside earlier and more graciously than any of their male peers.
What 2025 and 2026 are demonstrating — loudly, beautifully, sometimes angrily — is that this framework is crumbling. Shirley Manson, at 58, is making the best Garbage album in decades and telling tabloids to get bent when they comment on her appearance. Amy Lee is opening for Metallica on stadium tours and handpicking the most exciting women in heavy music for her 2026 tour. Alanis Morissette is selling half a million tickets. Lacey Sturm is coming home.
These women were never gone. They were just waiting for the world to catch up.
All tour dates and album information are subject to change. Check each artist’s official website for the most current ticketing and release details.