Album of the Week | Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter: SAVED!
The classically trained musician and performance artist sheds her Lingua Ignota moniker in a cathartic, unspooled revelation.

Spend as much time driving through the backroads of Pennsylvania as I have and you’ll become acutely familiar with Christian billboards. They verge from absurdly commercial (Call 855-FOR-TRUTH) to vaguely gruesome, depicting stigmata and Satan and, sometimes, a plain, despondent “FORGIVE MY SINS JESUS SAVE MY SOUL.” To me, these last ones are the most fascinating. They tower above highways in the same bright lettering, but they introduce a fundamental ambiguity: Where the rest are obvious, confident missives to nonbelievers, a sign that asks for deliverance in such bald language begs the question of who exactly is witnessing, and who is meant to be saved.
Kristin Hayter, the classically-trained musician and performance artist who, until recently, worked under the name Lingua Ignota, has a gift for engaging with the mysteries of Christian aesthetics. As Ignota, her early releases ALL BITCHES DIE (2018) and CALIGULA (2019) forged baroque and metal with liturgical language as a holy sword against abusers—drawing from a wellspring of grief and the unsung rage that survivorhood demands. 2021’s SINNER GET READY took a Pennsylvania Dutch angle, siphoning inspiration from the reclusive religious austerity of Hayter’s newfound home near Three Mile Island with a new palette of Appalachian instruments and avant-folk influences. This practice of reinvention is not only one of the things that makes Hayter such a fascinating and dynamic artist. It’s a necessary piece of recovery from the agony her music reckons with, which forces you to build yourself anew.
On her new album SAVED!, that reinvention is made literal. It’s Hayter’s first record under her own name—with a “Reverend” honorific added, after she got ordained as part of the process. She recorded its 11 stark pieces in high fidelity before forcing them onto a 4-track recorder, then churned them through a litany of broken cassette players, remaking the sound at each turn. Inspired by the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement and the brimstone sounds of Old Regular Baptists and the Louvin Brothers, the result is an unspooled revelation, a supplicant’s distorted glee—a celebration which Hayter leaves pointedly open-ended. “As you are when the end comes, so will you be when you must face Him,” she declares on the website of her label, Perpetual Flame Ministries. “Whether this is enlightenment or insanity is up to the listener to decide.”