Lingua Ignota-The Caligula Demos

After offering up harrowing covers of “Jolene”, “Wicked Game”, and the infamous Eminem song, “Kim”, on Bandcamp throughout the year, for the last Bandcamp Friday of this goddamned year, Lingua Ignota mastermind and Cheezit connoisseur Kristin Hayter has released a batch of demos from the sessions from the recording of her noisy, neoclassical industrial darkwave, reverse horrorcore, poetic hellwave masterpiece from last year, Caligula.

We get a lot of rough noise precursors to the frightful cacophony that eventually made it onto the album proper, as well as some more stripped back piano demos that highlight Hayter’s classical singing chops, but also a few songs that don’t resemble anything on Caligula and maybe just got cut from the album, like the song “KYRIE”, which features Hayter singing soulfully and relatively softly over a minimally Sunn O))) kind of metallic amplifier drone.

While it is indeed a demo album and the roughness that typically characterizes demo scraps does come through in a few of the less put-together pieces here, this is hardly a typical demo album, and the tracks here offer a great few snapshots of the creative process of one of the most transfixingly terrifying and emotionally raw albums of the past few years for fans of Lingua Ignota.

7/10