4th wave black metal

“There is an ethic to this: I want to make people uncomfortable,” Hunt-Hendrix admits. “And I believe I have a task to make people question their identifications with a culture.”

This habit became apparent several months after Liturgy issued its debut LP, Renihilation, in 2009, when the frontman delivered a nebulous philosophical treatise on the failures and promises of black metal, titled “Transcendental Black Metal”, at a symposium of theories about the genre. “Transcendental Black Metal is the reanimation of the form of black metal with a new soul, a soul full of chaos, frenzy and ecstasy,” read the essay, which disparaged the nihilism of the genre’s forebears and looked for techniques to overcome it.

As the young band built momentum during the next two years, the paper seemed only to accrete infamy: Veteran musicians penned open letters; message boards became Liturgy stomping grounds; anonymous commenters turned blog posts into virtual gallows. By the time Aesthethica arrived, liking Liturgy equated either to endorsing Hunt-Hendrix’s ideas or apologizing in advance for e

Liturgy is a Brooklyn-based, self-styled "Transcendental Black Metal" band whose yearning, energetic music exists in an uncanny space between avant rock, black metal, fine art and shamanic ritual. Led by songwriter and conceptual architect Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, who is joined by guitarist Bernard Gann, bassist Tyler Dusenbury and drummer Greg Fox, the band exists as a 21st century total work of art (gesamtkunstwerk): activating divine potencies by means of music and culture even as it underscores the contradictions inherent in such a project during the internet era. Their third full length, The Ark Work, is a quantum leap forward, a radical change in sound that paradoxically sounds more like Liturgy than ever.

The album hums and churns with Hunt-Hendrix's inventive arrangements - drenched with glockenspiels, bagpipes, strings, ritual chanting, and MIDI horns. It supplements its metal energy with motifs from unlikely, disparate genres; cross-fertilizing hardstyle beats, occult-oriented rap, and the glitched re-sampling of IDM and with structures from Medieval sacred

Liturgy want to invoke heaven through sound

What do you think?” Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix laughs when asked whether she considers western society to be in a state of decline. “I mean, what is going on?!”

It’s 11am in Brooklyn and the Liturgy founder has barely had time to complete her winter morning ritual – a prayer, followed by a trip to the grocery store to grab a coffee, fig bar and banana – before we enter the existential weeds. What is going on? Will things just continue to get weirder after Covid, as an astrologer she follows on social media suggested? And whose dog is barking non-stop in the background of our call? “This isn’t a chronic problem, it’s really just this morning,” Hunt-Hendrix answers, adding, with the same heartfelt curiosity that permeates her deepest philosophical reflections: “I wonder what the dog is seeing, actually.”

Hunt-Hendrix – a fascinating thinker as much as a bewildering composer – has rarely shied away from questioning the world around her. The pursuit of boundary pushing ideas has been her M.O. ever since she launched Liturgy as

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