Some artists build worlds; Lola G., the mind behind the ethereal Death Hags, builds an entire cosmology. Her new work, Orphée 53, sounds like it was transmitted from some flickering radio tower at the edge of dream and apocalypse; where the ghosts of musique concrète whisper through corrupted pop frequencies. It’s a record that feels alive, restless, sentient…the kind of art that looks you dead in the eye and asks, “You still think the future’s coming?”
Death Hags belongs to that rare breed of artists who understand that sound and image are two halves of the same fever dream. Her video for Orphée 53, stitched together from her own experimental films, public-domain skeletons, and atomic-age paranoia reels, evoke Chris Marker’s La Jetée as remixed by a digital medium trying to remember humanity. The flicker of Despotism, the morbid cartoon cavort of The Skeleton Dance, and the surreal hangover of Dream of a Rarebit Fiend all swirl together. It’s haunting, but not hopeless.
Musically, Orphée 53 lands somewhere between Broadcast’s spectral pop and the narcotic melancholy of Beach House, Chromatics, and Primitive Heart: synths throb and hum; voices drift in from a parallel dimension. The melodies shimmer, dissolve, reassemble. The title isn’t ornamental: Orphée 53 nods to Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry’s 1953 Musique Concrète opera, a moment when the avant-garde dared to court the machine.
Death Hags reclaims that shock of modernity for the algorithmic age, making peace with chaos rather than clinging to nostalgia. “Letting go of the past,” she says, and the music takes her at her word: the loops erode, tape warps, the song disintegrates and reforms like memory itself.
There’s a literary pulse here too: Proust by way of a synthesizer. In an era obsessed with retro filters and “simpler times,” Lola G. asks the harder question: what if the noise of the present is the only real sound left?
Watch thge video for Orphée 53 below:
Death Hags has traversed both North America and Europe, lighting up stages at festivals such as SXSW, Pop Montreal, Left of the Dial, Echo Park Rising, and Savannah Stopover. Her music has found its way onto the silver screen as well, appearing in films by Christophe Honoré and Steven Soderbergh. Recently, she composed the score for Mirror Moves, while her track Metal Teeth was featured in the acclaimed documentary Queens of Pain.
In 2021, Death Hags stepped away from touring to immerse herself in BIG GREY SUN, an ambitious, seven-part hermit dream exploring transformation in all its forms: the journey through the underworld, the dark night of the soul, the alchemical process of becoming. Dreamlike and largely instrumental, it drifts through the liminal space between sleep and waking — a haunting meditation on the void beyond reality, where we are no longer who we were, yet not quite who we will be.
Listen to Orphée 53 below and order BIG GREY SUN #5 here. The album comes in a lathe-cut 7″ picture disc.
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