Liturgy

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 They adopt the genre’s playing methods and styles but strip them of outdated religious semiotics – with role models such as Vlad the Impaler and Iannis Xenakis.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.