Haela Hunt-Hendrix transcends boundaries of faith, gender and metal as Liturgy front woman

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Black metal emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in Norway, most notoriously through the band Mayhem. The genre is infamous for its harsh anti-Christian stance and violent acts, which include church burnings.

“There was this rejection of Christian society and everything that it represented,” said Marcus Moberg, professor of religious studies at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and author of “Christian Metal: History, Ideology, Scene.” “Not simply the religious part of it, but Christian respectability.”

Moberg said early black metal musicians saw defiance of Christian values as liberation from what they considered the pious and repressive constraints of society. “The band Liturgy certainly does transgress the boundaries that black metal has set up for itself,” he said. 

When Hunt-Hendrix first published her manifesto, it drew a mixed response from the metal community. Ross Hagen, a music studies professor at Utah Valley University and metal scholar, recalled reading it online.

“What I mostly remember from the online communities was a kind of knee-jerk reaction against the academic-ness of it,” Hagen said. “And also, the underlying theme that black metal has gone stagnant and we need to provide a change for it and my band is the way that it’s going to go, I think, rubbed people the wrong way.”

Hagen said part of the backlash came from a paradox at the heart of the black metal genre. “When the anti-establishment nature of black metal becomes its own orthodoxy, it invites its own subversion,” he said.

Today, Hunt-Hendrix, who studied philosophy and classical music composition at Columbia University in New York, said she believes her music still walks in step with the ideas outlined in her 2009 manifesto. The difference now is the expansion of her faith.

“As I’ve studied more and my faith has continued on, to me, being a part of a church and participating in the actual Christian liturgy is now really important,” Hunt-Hendrix said. “I’ve become much more, like, literally theistic.”

Classical music is also a clear influence on Liturgy’s latest work. On the latest album, “93696″, released in 2023, angelic choral passages, light piano and lyrics drawn from the hierarchy of angels collide with experimental rhythmic beats, screeching vocals and crashing guitars. The result is an intense work that channels what Christians might describe as the experience of having one’s heart set ablaze with Christ’s love. Immersed in harmony, counterpoint and avant-garde techniques, the band pushes metal into more experimental territory, breaking away from its rigid rhythmic structures to create a sound at once operatic and disruptive.

Hunt-Hendrix’s search for transcendence began even earlier. As a teenager, she found a sense of the sublime in dark music, noting the “shock and grandeur” of Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin. Later, in the sweeping soundscapes of post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky, she sensed what she called “the glory of God without being religious.”

Gabriel Hollis, a pianist, software engineer and Christian, opened one of Hunt-Hendrix’s solo shows last year at Le Poisson Rouge in Brooklyn with a 12-minute piano set. “I think it can be said that metal music finds many of its roots in classical music,” Hollis said. “So much classical music was composed in an explicitly worshipful manner.” Hunt-Hendrix’s work, he added, is “exemplary worship music.”

“Christians need to pay attention to it — Christians of all denominations, even who might have some harsh differences with her on a political or religious level,” he said.

As a trans woman, Hunt-Hendrix rejects the idea that her gender should contradict her Orthodox Christian faith. “I don’t see a contradiction with my faith and my gender identity,” she said. “Early church fathers said that prior to the fall, Adam and Eve had no gender … that gender is a post-fall artifact.” 

Arguments that Christianity requires strictly biological understandings of gender, she said, are shallow. “That’s superficial,” she said. “It’s not what Christ was about.”

Metal has roots in stereotypical masculinity and hateful or aggressive ideologies, and in today’s scene, queer artists still remain relatively rare. According to research published in 2018, metal music production historically has been dominated by men, with women making up only about 3% of all metal musicians and vocalists. Despite this, Hagen said he has observed some shifts in the past 10 years. “I would say that there is consciously more room for female-fronted and very queer-forward bands out there today,” Hagen said.