Avant-pop duo LEYA and black metal group Liturgy released their collaboration “Antigone,”mixing two different genres of music into one five-minute song.
“Antigone” contains elements of heavy metal, classical, experimental and avant-pop music, sounding like hard rock met the Renaissance. It varies between tranquil vocal deliveries from LEYA and a frantic, high-energy performance from Liturgy, emphasizing the drums and guitar. In an interview with Paper Magazine, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix outlined the story of Antigone, and how the song’s message is inspired by finding meaning in life by searching for one’s authentic self and doing what they have to in order to find meaning.
Hunt-Hendrix and Adam Markiewicz of LEYA provide vocals, while Hunt-Hendrix wrote the song and Markiewicz plays the violin. Marilu Donovan plays the harp, Tia Vincent-Clark is on bass, and Bernard Green and Leo Didkovsky play guitar.
LEYA said to Paper that they love collaborations and wanted to collaborate with Hunt-Hendrix. The duo worked with Hunt-Hendrix in the past, and since both Liturgy and LEYA planned to release around the same time, they wanted to go on tour together to promote each other’s albums. That is where the collaboration was born.
“We recorded the song in late February before 2020 got so insane,” Hunt-Hendrix told Paper. “Originally its purpose was as a single to promote a tour we were going to do together last April that ended up getting canceled.”
Hunt-Hendrix explained to Paper that the group hoped to release “Antigone” under another name in April, but they held off on releasing it because they wanted to reschedule their tour. The group then decided to release the track once they officially canceled their tour. Hunt-Hendrix continued and told Paper that after coming out as transgender, the group decided to change the name of the track.
“The actual decision to decisively come out was really sudden, and involved a week of basically sobbing every day during the lockdown — though I’d been building towards it for a long time,” she said in the Paper interview. “I was feeling unsteady about releasing the song at all after that, but we decided to go through with it though it became important to me to change its name, which was sort of a surrogate for me changing my own name.”
Liturgy formed in 2005 and has released four studio albums and an EP. Their latest studio album, H.A.Q.Q., was announced in November along with another project. The album was surprise-released that month. They are also known for their opera, Origin of the Alimonies.
Their 2015 album, The Ark Work, was named the top avant-garde album of the year by Rolling Stone and Spin.
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