With the release of her fifth album, the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter explores a new step in her artistic narrative : salvation. 

On October 20th, American multidisciplinary artist Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter (formerly known as Lingua Ignota) released her first album through her label Perpetual Flame Ministries. Though this is her debut under this new moniker, Hayter’s newest LP follows the narratives of her previous works as Lingua Ignota, offering a hopeful turn to the violent and difficult themes of prior albums such as CALIGULA (2019) and SINNER GET READY (2021).

Survivor Anthems

Kristin Michael Hayter was born in California in 1986, to a Catholic family who quickly discovered her musical ability and enrolled her in a conservatory. Into adolescence, she became a part of the California extreme music scene, simultaneously singing in small opera productions and playing in her friends’ Black Metal bands.

She came to distance herself from the hardcore scene, in large part due to its rampant sexism, as well as her growing academic career. Hayter attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as Brown University. Much of her early work as Lingua Ignota came from her MFA thesis titled BURN EVERYTHING TRUST NO ONE KILL YOURSELF. 

This was a multidisciplinary performance wherein Hayter sung many of the songs which would end up on her first two records LET THE EVIL OF HIS OWN LIPS COVER HIM (2017) and ALL BITCHES DIE (2017) over projected images of burning buildings, and of pages from a 10, 000 page manuscript she algorithmically composed from sexist lyrics found in hardcore music.

In 2017, Hayter released both LET THE EVIL and ALL BITCHES. These albums followed the idea of her possession by the culture of sexism surrounding her, prompting the stage name Lingua Ignota – a universal language spoken by God through possessed bodies. Hayter finds herself possessed, poly-vocally expressing the ideals of abusive, sexist men (“All your screaming / What’s it worth? / Bitches get what they deserve”), her rage and desire for revenge (“Let burning coals fall upon him! / Let the evil of his own lips cover him! / Let him be cast into deep pits that he may not rise again”), and her desperation, reaching up to God for protection (“Deliver me O Lord from the violent man! / Preserve me from the violent man!”). 

Hayter’s rage is expressed through an exploration of female murderers, sampling Aileen Wuornos on her song “DISEASE OF MEN”. Hayter flips the trope of hardcore musicians using serial killer samples for pure shock value by choosing a clip of Wuornos pointing to the systemic causes which pushed her to kill. 

Hayter comes to call these tracks “survivor anthems”, simultaneously rational in their exploration of the systemic causes of violence, but also deeply emotional in their expression of the fear and rage born from sexist abuse. The deeply honest quality of these survivor anthems continually comes back to the search for God, and the clear-cut morals many survivors of abuse find ourselves clinging to, as abuse cycles through us.‍

The Beast

Hayter’s portrayal of abuse is its most visceral in her third album CALIGULA. She explains the name of this album as a reference to the madness of the eponymous Roman emperor, a sort of parallel to the chaos she finds within herself after suffering from abuse.

Hayter creates a sonically oppressive album, something as overwhelming as the feelings it describes. She works with various figures from the harsh noise and metal scenes, pulling members from groups such as THE RITA, The Body, and Full of Hell, consciously going against her classical vocal training to create dissonant, unpleasant vocals. She tells Louder Sound “Many many times on CALIGULA, we kept the ugliest take”.

The narrative of CALIGULA is as polyphonic as Hayter’s music gets, expressing her history of abuse through menacing dialogue between herself and her abuser. The song “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR” features a dialogue between a victim, lost against the massive support network backing her abuser, and said abuser, portrayed as an all-powerful, evil God : “My friends all wear your colors / Your flag flies above every door / But bitch, I smell you bleeding / And I know where you sleep”.

Hayter identifies the central theme of CALIGULA in the song “I AM THE BEAST”, singing “All I want is boundless love / All I know is violence”. This describes the simultaneous rage and stasis of the record - how can one change their ways and love another, when the only interactional model they know is abuse?

A Perpetual Flame

SINNER GET READY is Hayter’s most critically acclaimed record, earning her a rare 10/10 rating from bald critic Anthony Fantano. This album follows Hayter as she finds herself living alone in rural Pennsylvania, trying to make sense of the abuse she went through. During this period, she describes spending much of her time in antique shops looking at old Appalachian musical instruments, and developing a fascination with the local lore and religion.

It is through a sort of documentarian perspective on the religious traditions of Pennsylvanian Charismatic Christianity that Hayter dialogues with God on what happened to her. She sets the scene on the opening track, “THE ORDER OF SPIRITUAL VIRGINS”, describing God’s overwhelming power “I am relentless, I am incessant, I am the ocean” (this lyric also parallels an album which shall remain nameless, made by her abuser, in which the motif of the ocean was a recurrent symbol for the inevitability of death). 

Hayter’s dialogue with God is most visceral on the song “I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES”, where she demands that God enact her revenge : “I don’t give a fuck / Just kill him / You have to / I’m not asking”. 

Where CALIGULA establishes the abuser as an inevitable God punishing his victim for their “sin”, SINNER GET READY features an investigation into the figure of Jimmy Swagart, famous televangelist who lost his career after being caught cheating on his wife with a sex worker. The fall from Holiness into sin that is seen in Swagart’s story becomes an expression of the tension between abuse and victimhood, of the difficulty that comes with trying to live a life of “boundless love” whilst “only knowing violence”.

The quiet of Pennsylvania enveloping Hayter’s reflections, she calls on a figure of local lore, the underground mine fire of Centralia. Under the ground of the city of Centralia, an underground fire has been burning in a mine since 1962. The metaphorical value of the perpetual flame of Centralia is highlighted in the album’s eponymous track : “Life is a song, a song / And the fires of Hell burn long”. Hayter’s life goes on like a silent song, while her abuse burns like an underground fire.

Salvation At Last

The documentarian character of SINNER GET READY is also found in SAVED! (2023), as Hayter seeks to create an artifact, a sound and a narrative lost through time. She does this by purposefully weathering the cassette tapes of the album, and re-recording this damaged audio. The result is a haunting, eerie, and dissonant mix. Upon listening, one feels as though they are witnessing a relic.

The Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter explains her rebirth and change of name as a rupture from the Lingua Ignota project’s contemplation of her pain. A statement put out through her record label reads “It is not healthy for me to relive my worst experiences over and over through LI [...] I am taking a new direction with my music and I am looking forward to the future.” This is the central theme of SAVED! – finding salvation through rebirth.This record follows a running theme of Holy omnipresence, the constant tangibility of God’s love. Where the Lingua Ignota discography focused on the wrath of God, his ultimate power and ineffability, ‘SAVED!’ portrays a God who can create perfection, who can rebirth us into perfection, who can save us. Hayter describes this salvation in “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS”, singing “Once I was as ugly as a harpy-bitten tree / And every voice within me spoke ‘you will never be free’ [...] But today I am as perfect as a single blade of grass / Because I am free”. ‍

SAVED! marks a new evolution in the music of Kristin Hayter, presenting God not as a passive force watching abuse happens, or as the abuser himself, but rather as a creator of tangible perfection. Abuse victims can now return to this perfection, and be reborn through religious devotion.

In the words of the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter herself “whether this is enlightenment or insanity is up to the listener to decide.”‍

‘SAVED!’ merch and LP through Perpetual Flame Ministries