Lingua Ignota, AKA Rhode Island musician Kristin Hayter, released one of 2018’s most startling and unfairly overlooked records in All Bitches Die. Written in the wake of domestic abuse, it built through images of horrific violence towards Holy Is the Name, an eerily beautiful ballad imagining her lying alongside her dead abuser, praising a scythe and axe. As a closing image it was emphatic, but her second album announces that any Hollywood narrative of overcoming trauma is a lie: abuse, she asserts, can linger for a lifetime. “Life is cruel and time heals nothing”, runs one bitter lyric.
Once again, Hayter draws from a wealth of inspirations to create a sledgehammer amalgam. On Do You Doubt Me Traitor, she unleashes totally desperate shrieks – “How do I break you before you break me?” – until she hyperventilates, showing up much of the roaring you hear from black metallers as safe, pampered and stable. But passages like this, or spells of huge noisy downforce that recall Sunn O))), are offset with more spartan, stately strings-and-piano sections, evoking the relief and clarity one experiences after a bout of vomiting. Hayter has spoken of her fascination with Roman Catholicism, and there is a liturgical quality to this latter style – she sometimes delivers her enunciated, discrete lyrics like a terrible benediction, or like the fathers in The Exorcist telling Regan the power of Christ compels her.
Those lyrics are often so pertinent to the confusion that comes with abuse. “Who will love you if I don’t? Who will fuck you if I won’t?” she wonders, announcing her abuser as pathetic and yet pitying them to the point of nearly returning; by titling the song May Failure Be Your Noose, she ends up deciding to wish them nothing but ill.
Hayter is classically trained, and there is emotional as well as technical brilliance to the way she expands her vocal palette here – Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow! sees her split her voice apart like a throat singer, while other sections recall the subtle ululations of traditional Gaelic song. Sadly it sounds like her revenger’s tragedy is not yet over, but the survival – indeed flourishing – of her unique artistry is its own triumph.
