Shaggy Hair, Hard Rock: Like ’75 All Over Again

“It’s getting very intense,” said Steph Paynes, guitarist and founder of Lez Zeppelin, “which is nice.”

Ms. Paynes, a Long Island native, was speaking of her 11-year-old band’s inexorable march to greater heights. The four-piece, all-female group, devoted to the music of the English hard rock band Led Zeppelin, has long been a favorite of the summer crowd at Amagansett’s Stephen Talkhouse. They performed to a packed and frenzied audience on May 23 and will return tomorrow for another 8 p.m. show.

In between, Ms. Paynes said last week, the band played to thousands at a festival in Singapore. In October, they will tour France, Belgium, and Switzerland and will celebrate Halloween with shows at the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska.

In no small part, the band’s popularity is testament to its forerunner. When Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, Jimmy Page, the band’s visionary guitarist and producer, was already a seasoned session musician and performer. The quartet he assembled took the blues form and ran with it, producing some of rock ’n’ roll’s most powerful, creative, and lasting music.

“It sounds just as relevant in 2015, I would argue, as it did in 1975,” Ms. Paynes said.

But in equally large measure, Lez Zeppelin’s success is owed to its own virtuosity, its mastery of some very challenging music. Leesa Harrington-Squyres, the band’s drummer, is note-perfect in recreating the thundering drive of the late John Bonham, widely acknowledged as rock ’n’ roll’s finest and most powerful drummer. Onstage, Ms. Paynes replicates not only the testosterone-driven riffs and overdriven electric-guitar tones of Mr. Page (a fan of the band), but also his mannerisms, down to the guitarist’s slinky moves and sidelong glances.

The music is bracing, sexy, and overtly suggestive. The fact that it is being performed by four young women, as novel a device as that may be, is almost, at this point, an afterthought. Among today’s mass of bands that pay tribute to a specific group—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd are among the most popular in this niche — Lez Zeppelin, like Led Zeppelin, stands virtually alone.

“There’s something about the music,” Ms. Paynes said. “It’s so good, and so dynamic, that here we are.” Here, there, and everywhere, in fact. “India, Japan, all over Europe — Poland, where the language is completely unintelligible for Americans,” she said. “But they love it; they know the words. You’re playing a show in Mumbai” — in 2009 — “and they’re pumping their fists in the air. It’s so interesting, this job. You find Zeppelin freaks everywhere. They’re under every rock, so to speak. They pop up in the craziest places.”

Such is their devotion that Lez Zeppelin has added the complete performance of specific Led Zeppelin concerts to their repertoire. “The Song Remains the Same,” a film and recording documenting a 1973 concert at Madison Square Garden, is one. The band’s 1970 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall and a 1979 concert before 200,000 people at the Knebworth Festival in England are also performed.

“We don’t just play the songs,” Ms. Paynes said. “We try to play it the way they played it, so there is all sorts of nuance. Talk about a challenge,” she said of the Royal Albert Hall show. “The playing is furious; everyone sounds unbelievable.”

Lez Zeppelin’s “latest mission,” Ms. Paynes said, is a performance of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 concerts at Earls Court Arena in London, a series that many consider to be the band’s best performances. They will play the Earls Court concert on Nov. 16 at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan.

But just as technical proficiency on a musical instrument serves the higher goal of allowing self-expression, “the key to it,” Ms. Paynes said of her single-minded focus on the music of Led Zeppelin, “is the absolute exuberance, passion, and skill. They played this music with complete abandon, spontaneity, and passion. For a so-called cover band to do that — I’ve always taken that as our challenge. Most cover bands are hoping they can get the notes right and dress the right way, but there’s a whole other layer. That layer is what’s interesting to me as a musician. That, I think, is what the band aims to do: unleash the magic, the power. It’s not even intentional anymore. It’s just who we are and what we dig about it.”

“I deeply believe,” Ms. Paynes continued, “that the only way to get into that magical place between you and the audience, you and the band, is to let it go and truly improvise. That also means you can fall on your face. And I have fallen on my face — often — but when you hit it, there is nothing like it. Nothing! I play things I never thought I’d play, and I can tell because the audience loses its mind. That, for me, is where it’s at.”

Tickets to Lez Zeppelin, tomorrow night at 8 at the Stephen Talkhouse, are $65.