Liturgy

Liturgy is the project of Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, whose yearning, energetic “transcendental black metal” exists in the space between metal, art music and sacred ritual. Its current lineup includes Mario Miron (guitar), Tia Vincent-Clark (bass) and Leo Didkovsky (drums). Celebrated for their fusion of sincere emotion, compositional complexity, stylistic daring and intense live energy, the band is simultaneously a medium and platform for drama and theology. It was founded in the context of Brooklyn DIY as a solo project by Hunt-Hendrix in 2005 while she was studying philosophy and classical composition at Columbia.  In 2009 Hunt-Hendrix stimulated fervent conversation in the music world with her text “Transcendental Black Metal”, and after expanding to a quartet they made waves globally with their 2011 sophomore album Aesthethica for fusing black metal with math rock and infusing the form with a counterintuitively loving, emotional energy. Their ambitious 2015 album The Ark Work was controversial for its incorporation of IDM and trap production into their musical language. In fall 2019 they solidified this sound world with their highly acclaimed fourth studio album H.A.Q.Q., which is tied to an ongoing philosophical YouTube lecture series. Their fifth studio album, an opera entitled Origin of the Alimonies, was released in November 2020, recorded with an eight-piece chamber ensemble and performed at Roadburn festival in 2021 as the live score to an eponymous film created by Hunt-Hendrix. After a solo sculpture exhibition in 2022, the album 93696 was released in 2023 followed by an extensive world tour.

For the last decade and a half, the New York band Liturgy has epitomised the secular turn in black metal music. They adopt the genre’s playing methods and styles but strip them of outdated religious semiotics – with role models such as Vlad the Impaler and Iannis Xenakis. At least that’s how the band’s singer and lead guitarist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix explains it. Together with her fellow musicians, she weaves garish bouquets of shrill noise arrangements and excitingly misleading metrics.