HYMNAL
Lyra Pramuk
The Big Issue Australia
Issue #7404 July 2025
By Olivia J. Bennett
Lyra Pramuk’s Hymnal is a breathless, searching work: part rite, part rupture. Across 14 tracks, the Berlin-based artist extends her vocal world-building into something more exalted, even alien. Like her 2020 single, ‘Tendril’, this album coils around the body: electroacoustic seance meets post-minimalist fugue. It’s hard to know where one track ends and the next begins, but that blur feels deliberate. These aren’t songs, exactly. They’re states. ‘Unchosen’ surges with feverish strings and breathy, layered vocals, evoking something both ecclesiastical and disorientating, like being bathed in light that might also burn. ‘Babel’ drones from a sacred elsewhere, all buzz and bellow, gesturing towards a language just out of reach. Pramuk’s technical precision is extraordinary. Her breath control feels like an invocation. But Hymnal can be difficult to hold onto. It resists catharsis in favour of transcendence, evasion over climax. If a hymn is meant to lift us closer to the divine, Hymnal does, but it doesn’t wait for us to follow. It ascends, vanishes and leaves a shimmer in its wake.