Lingua Ignota also known as Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter born June 17, 1986 (age 39) Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") 2023, citing the unhealthiness of reliving her trauma through her performances, Hayter retired the Lingua Ignota project. She embodied a new persona under the moniker Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.
Her professional music career began in 2017 with the self-released albums Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him and All Bitches Die, which spread through word-of-mouth. Lingua Ignota's two 2017 releases, Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him and All Bitches Die, have been described using a wide range of musical genres, including baroque, black metal, classical, death industrial, doom metal, electronic, extreme metal, experimental, folk, harsh noise wall, metal, industrial, neoclassical, noise, opera, power electronics and spiritual. Third studio album, Caligula, features fewer industrial and electronic influences.
Hayter herself admits she has difficulty describing her musical genre Hayter's music caught the attention of Profound Lore Records, who re-issued All Bitches Die and released her third studio album, Caligula, in 2019, which was met with universal critical acclaim. Her fourth album, Sinner Get Ready, was released in 2021 on Sargent House and received more widespread critical acclaim. Her work as Lingua Ignota drew from her experiences as a survivor of domestic violence for musical and lyrical inspiration, and she describes her music as "survivor anthems". Her debut album as Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, Saved!, came out in 2023
Just four albums for an important but painful experience for the Rhode Island artist who, until not too long ago, lived his music as a tool to process and overcome traumas that arose as a result of a series of abuses, domestic violence and toxic relationships (including the one with Alexis Marshall, frontman of the Daughters)
With the eleven tracks of "Saved!" begins the new artistic life of Kristin Hayter, an American musician who rose to international prominence thanks to the success of the Lingua Ignota project, which began in 2017 with the self-produced "Let The Evil Of His Own Lips Cover Him" and brought to a conclusion with the highly acclaimed "Sinner Get Ready" in 2021.
to her interest in religion and her education in art, literature and linguistics, Kristin Hayter found herself in a unique position to embark on a kind of anthropological experiment through her latest album. Released under the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, “Saved!” is a concept album which explores a fictionalized conversion to Pentecostalism. Hayter doesn’t just utilize her voice for singing on “Saved!” Woven throughout is her attempt at glossolalia — speaking in tongues — a defining feature of Pentecostalism, according to Grant Wacker, a historian at Duke Divinity School who specializes in the denomination.
“It’s important to understand how fundamental speaking in tongues is to the identity of historic Pentecostals,” Wacker said, recalling the pressure he himself witnessed to speak in tongues growing up in the church.
“The pastor would encourage young people — usually teenagers — they’d say ‘Well, just start talking faster and faster, and before long, your tongue will just fall into it,’” he said. The pain that was the basis of the music of Lingua Ignota continues to pulsate. Hayter's beautiful voice and piano open glimpses of melody on a canvas where the lumps of suffering, although in the process of liquefaction, seem to resist the saving efforts of its author. A veil of desperation envelops the intense songs of "Saved!", an album of pure spirituality, poised between antiquity and modernity, in which nothing is left on the surface. It is a journey into the heart and belly of an artist who, although fragile, knows how to be extraordinarily strong from a musical point of view, because she is able to convey all her raw and truest emotions with a few instruments and incredible effectiveness.
That Hayter turns such a sacred and integral aspect of the faith into a performance, while cultivating conditions that could bring the act of speaking in tongues about, could be taken as disingenuous. But Wacker says similar tactics are frequently employed within the Pentecostal church.
Lingua Ignota opened for experimental metal band The Body during their North American June–August 2018 tour, who Hayter credits for welcoming her into the experimental metal scene. The Body was touring in support of I Have Fought Against It, but I Can't Any Longer., an album that features guest vocals from Hayter