Album of the Week | Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter: SAVED!

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.”

There are familiar tracks on SAVED! for anyone who’s spent time in church pews. Its original compositions are paired with solo piano renditions of hymns like “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and, of course, “There’s Power in the Blood.” These are cut with echoes of glossolalia, more commonly known as speaking in tongues—a level of transcendence that Hayter achieved through “sleep deprivation, fasting, repetition of prayer, and sensory overstimulation.” This is connected to the album’s charismatic aesthetic, but it’s also a link back to Lingua Ignota—whose name derived from the Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen’s divinely-given “unknown language.”

The tongues reveal another connection to Lingua Ignota: the music’s relationship with trauma, and the way Hayter’s work exorcizes it. In November of 2022, Hayter posted to Instagram from the Lingua Ignota account to announce that she would be retiring the project due to the emotional strain it caused. “It is not healthy for me to relive my worst experiences over and over through [Lingua Ignota],” she explained. “My healing has finally allowed me to feel how painful that is.” The conflict here, the idea that processing and regurgitating pain can itself cause harm, is also explored on SAVED!. The video for “I Will Be With You Always” depicts Hayter with glowing lamps hanging around her neck and shoulders, an artifact of previous performances. “The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,” she sings softly elsewhere, as another voice screams and babbles.

Hayter uses these self-allusions not only to reflect upon and conclude the Lingua Ignota story, but to revel in the possibilities that could come after it. “All My Friends Are Going to Hell” is a condemnation of an enabling community, another echo of her earlier work. The track leads with warps from the recording process, through which a nasal, unaccompanied warble rings out, warning “cruelty and greed may on Earth serve you well, but when you die you are going to Hell.” But there’s a new sureness to its lyrics, a shedding. Rather than calling upon the divine to wreak vengeance for her as she used to, Hayter is confident now that vengeance will be wrought, washing her hands of the need to inflict it. In the music video, she races through a thick forest with her hands raised in sublimation and self-protection, until the trees give way to a riverbank. She descends up to her shoulders, takes a deep ragged breath and allows the water to carry her away.

“May This Comfort and Protect You” comes as a balm on the record, a quiet respite from the cataclysm and zeal. It finds Hayter back alone at the piano, which has been laid in chains that twist and flatten its strings. “The Lord shall mend your aching heart and hold your aching soul,” she promises. Her voice rings clarion over the bound instrument, which still sounds a hopeful church melody. By closer “How Can I Keep From Singing,” the chains are gone, the music uninhibited. But the tongues return, horrifying and exhilarating, contrasting the calm in Kristin Hayter’s voice with devastating catharsis. That duality is the heart of SAVED!, which professes a simple, guaranteed salvation — but only if you insist, through blood and iron, on taking it.

Annie Parnell is a writer, radio host and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has appeared in FLOOD Magazine, The Virginia Literary Review and elsewhere. Annie can be found online @avparnell and avparnell.com.