Liturgy

The project of Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy incorporates elements of black metal, art rock, classical, hip hop, and trap production into a musical language they dub “transcendent black metal,” informed by visual art, philosophy, and speculative theological and eschatological theory. 2009′s Renihilation offered quality to the style’s quintessential circular riffs, ferocious vocalizations, and blastbeats. With 2011′s Aesthethica, they pushed the creative possibilities of metal itself by adding vocal polyphony and complex harmonic structures. Liturgy’s music became ever more ambitious and intricate: 2015′s electronics and chromatic percussion-enhanced The Ark Work was followed by 2020′s live opera, Origin of the Alimonies, performed alongside an eleven-piece chamber ensemble. They returned in March 2023 with 93696 for Thrill Jockey.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Liturgy began as the solo project of Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. In 2008, it expanded to a four-piece with the addition of guitarist Bernard Gann, drummer Greg Fox, and bassist Tyler Dusenbury. Impressed by the band’s intense blastbeats, cyclical guitars, and howling vocals, 20 Buck Spin signed Liturgy and released their debut album, Renihilation, in May 2009. Produced by Krallice’s Colin Marston, it won acclaim for how it eschewed traditional metal iconography in favor of a powerfully spiritual quality. Liturgy signed to Thrill Jockey (which reissued Renihilation in 2014) and pushed the boundaries of metal even further with May 2011′s Aesthethica. Once again produced by Marston, the album was heavier and more complex, and placed on the year-end lists of several prominent publications.
After Aesthethica’s release, Hunt-Hendrix and Gann toured as a duo version of Liturgy. The band then took a break while Hunt-Hendrix retooled Liturgy’s sound. During that time, Survival, a project with longtime collaborators Greg Smith and Jeff Bobula, released a self-titled album on Thrill Jockey in 2013. When she returned to Liturgy in late 2014, the project’s music expanded to include everything from MIDI horns to bagpipes to liturgical chants to indie rock. Fox and Dusenbury returned to record The Ark Work, a provocative and polarizing set that arrived on Thrill Jockey in March 2015.
In 2016, Hunt-Hendrix launched her electronic solo project Kel Valhaal with New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala, which expanded on the mythologies she established on Liturgy’s albums. Hunt-Hendrix’s ambitions continued to grow with 2018′s Origin of the Alimonies. A video opera that she composed, directed, and starred in, the piece was shown in New York City with Liturgy and an 11-piece chamber ensemble performing its live score. A year later, the opera was performed live in Los Angeles with the Sonic Boom Ensemble. Also in 2019, Hunt-Hendrix debuted her trap-meets-djent project Ideal with the single “Seraphim.” She capped off the year with the November release of Liturgy’s fourth album, H.A.Q.Q. Related to her series of video lectures on social media, it was the project’s first album to appear on Hunt-Hendrix’s label YLYLCYN and the first to feature bassist Tia Vincent-Clark and drummer Leo Didkovsky. A year later, the label issued Origin of the Alimonies as an album with an accompanying video.
In October 2022, Liturgy — now a quartet that includes second quitarist Mario Miron– issued a four track mini-album titled As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time. The full length 93696 appeared in March the following year. The number 93696 is derived equally from the religions of Christianity and Thelema, a numerological representation of heaven. Hunt-Hendrix composed the music to explore “Haelegen,” ie. heaven, via adherece to and division of, four “laws”: Sovereignty, hierarchy, emancipation, and individuation. They infofmed the songs by offering individual, interlinked dramas within the personal and conceptual themes in the lyrics. They recorded the album to tape in a more organic way than Liturgy’s standard “track building” process. The band desireda more “punk-meets-classical than metal,” sound according to Hunt-Hendrix, to create urgency framed by choral voices, buoyed by layers of rock and orchestral instrumentation. ~ Thom Jurek