In the music video for She’s Walking Down, The Yagas frontwoman Vera Farmiga plays a foreseer. As her eyes turn white, she has visions of a girl in danger who kills her abuser. These powers of foresight recall her portrayal of paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren in blockbuster supernatural horror franchise The Conjuring.
“I play a clairvoyant who’s a rock star in the paranormal community,” laughs Vera of the movie. “It’s so analogous!”
The Ukrainian-American actor has starred in a string of movies and TV shows over the last three decades, including the award-winning Psycho ‘contemporary prequel’ Bates Motel, and was nominated for an Oscar for 2009 comedy-drama Up In The Air. It’s horror-franchise The Conjuring she’s best known for, though. To date, the series (including spin-off movies such as The Nun and Annabelle) has grossed more than $2.3 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing horror franchise of all-time, surpassing the likes of Alien, Resident Evil and IT. Although Vera’s a trained classical pianist, she never envisioned herself starting an additional career in music, let alone in metal.
“I grew up with radio stations tuned in to Pavarotti, and the tape cassettes in my house were Ukrainian folk,” she notes. “Metal wasn’t my parents’ jam, so I wasn’t exposed to it at all!”
Her introduction to metal came through her husband/The Yagas keyboardist Renn Hawkey, formerly of industrial band Deadsy, who explains that Vera “fell in love” with bands such as Deftones and Korn while on tour with him in the 2000s. It wasn’t until they enrolled their children in Woodstock music school Rock Academy during the pandemic, however, and discovered its adult programme, that Vera’s attraction to metal would fully take hold.
“I think your first assignment was Iron Maiden,” Renn remembers, addressing Vera. “That was your first foray into exploring your voice, and just all Hell came out. It was a beautiful thing to witness, especially 20 years into a relationship, to make that discovery about you.”
Over the last few years, footage of Vera performing covers at the school, including songs by Maiden, Slipknot and Black Sabbath, have made headlines, and it was there that Vera and Renn would form their own band in 2023, alongside Academy co-owner/drummer Jason Bowman, plus guitarist Mark Visconti and bassist Mike Davis (both music teachers).
Their bewitchingly mystical debut, Midnight Minuet, journeys deep into the human subconscious through a mélange of diverse sounds, from the oscillating, razor-sharp prog metal of She’s Walking Down to the shadowy alt rock of Bridle. Though Vera attests to knowing “very little” about music, operating purely on “instinct and impulse”, she compares the act of conveying emotion in a band to her profession as an actor.
“I know how to tell stories and I know how to cry out,” she explains. “I’m just assigning notes to the words, and conjuring through melodies and harmonies. It’s really no different to what I do onscreen.”
Thanks to Vera’s traditional musical upbringing and her bandmates’ heavier backgrounds, The Yagas draw on a broad pool of influences, from Ukrainian folk music to The Cure, AC/DC, NIN and Judas Priest. Their alchemical, genre-crossing approach to songwriting is reflected in their name, which references Baba Yaga – a prominent figure in Slavic folklore. Vera says Baba Yaga has “haunted” her during moments of sleep paralysis.
“Baba Yaga is my spirit animal,” Vera explains. “My Ukrainian grandfather used to make up fairy tales about princesses running amok in the Carpathian Forest. For me, Baba Yaga was always the most intriguing character. She was a shapeshifter; sometimes helpful, sometimes profane. She rode the balance between rich and barren, light and dark, good and bad.”
Explaining Baba Yaga’s role within their songwriting, Renn says: “Speaking of her shapeshifting characteristic, I think we want to have that flexibility, to be able to explore different genres with each song.”
As well as myth, Midnight Minuet pulls from dreams, altered states of consciousness, and themes of mortality and generational trauma. The hauntingly hypnotic I Am explores the liminal space between life and death, and reflects Vera’s experience spending time at a hospice with her grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. A vocalisation resembling her disorientated final words finds its way into the bridge.
“My grandmother grew up in Ukraine under Russian oppression, orphaned by the time she was eight,” Vera explains. “She had seen it all – hunger, starvation, real torment – and persevered through everything."
“With Alzheimer’s, it’s like her body forgot how to pass. She had one foot in this world and the other in the next, but I could see her reliving all these traumatic experiences in her life, and at this point, the woman spoke Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, German, French and English. If she would mutter anything, it was a combination of all these languages and gibberish, and it would frighten me.”
Vera describes the making of Midnight Minuet as like “a dare to waltz under the moon”, and much of the album syphons its power from the dark and metaphysical. On the title track, co-written with Acacia Ludwig (who has previously toured with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and co-owns the Rock Academy with husband/drummer Jason Bowman), The Yagas ponder over something Vera calls “post mortem walls” – the divide between this world and the place of our ancestors.
“At the time, I know Acacia was grieving her mum, and that was an influence in terms of this yearning for our loved ones who’ve passed – our guides. It’s the desire to connect, but also raising the questions of, ‘Where do we meet? Do you come here? Or do I find a way to cross over?’”
The Crying Room partly calls upon the anguish and pain that Vera’s extended family have faced on the front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“What I’ve seen my family members go through for me to have this life that I live, they had to endure enormous amounts of oppression and suffering. Their trauma is my trauma, and this is me releasing that torment,” she says.
To find that catharsis, Vera imagined blocking out the demands of daily life to focus on her innermost feelings. “Renn found an article that talks about anechoic chambers, which is a place devoid of sound,” she explains. “It’s just this silence. Within minutes of being alone, you hallucinate a little. I thought, ‘If I had access to an anechoic chamber, what would emerge for me, devoid of all the noise? What would bubble up to the surface?’”
Using this approach, Vera says multiple songs on the album seemed to appear “out of thin air”, largely written in a process of purging “whatever is stuck in these deep recesses”.
“For several of the songs, I’ll just scan gibberish, just consonants and vowels that flow out of my mouth, and all of a sudden, subconsciously, those will become words,” she explains.
To capture this spontaneity, several songs on Midnight Minuet were recorded at random moments in the day, around Vera and Renn’s house, and even pick up on background noise, such as the scraping of kitchen stools and their children yelling. Many were left as first takes. And although Vera does her best to explain the creative process of The Yagas, there’s something about it that she just can’t put her finger on.
“This band is magic,” she concludes. “We have this cauldron, and we each throw in our seeds. They germinate, and magical things come to fruition."
Midnight Minuet is out now.
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