Caligula

It might not be an easy listen at times, but make no mistake, this is a vital an important record and one that needs to be heard in order to make sense of it. A definite contender for album of the year and one whose impact will stand alongside Lou Reed‘s Berlin for years to come.

Hayter's already dynamic aesthetic. Her thoughtful amalgam of opera, neoclassical darkwave, and death industrial continues to produce theatrical yet still intimate pieces. But above all, Hayter's uncompromised voice tells a necessary story that contests the dominant narratives of women's trauma. Her vivid, brutal portrayal of the enduring effects of misogyny and domestic abuse strictly reveals the gruesome realities of it.

With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

An even deeper dig into the wound exposed on her debut. The album is drenched in divinity, its consideration of good and evil as polar concepts is biblical, elevating vengeance to a God-given imperative. Her classically trained voice deals in spiritual cadences, and commands gothic instrumentation of strings and drones. [Aug 2019, p.58]

Hayter is classically trained, and there is emotional as well as technical brilliance to the way she expands her vocal palette here.

From start to finish, this album feels like an exposed wound, freshly – you might almost say studiously – picked and mastered to tape. It is an album of baroque intensity and gothic flamboyance played out like one long cathartic scream. Like an onion, it offers up layer after layer to slowly unpeel, each one a potential incitement to the very bitterest tears.