Our 2026 listening resolutions: from Radiohead to Kendrick Lamar, critics try to get into music they’ve never liked

'...her floor-shaking melismatic vocals seem to channel something ancient and terrible...'

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My first interaction with the truly uncategorisable music of Diamanda Galás was at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2012, a performance that moved me to tears but left me none the wiser, to be honest, about her place in the pantheon of 20th-century avant garde artists. But at least I started the right way round: experiencing her multifaceted mezzo-soprano in the flesh is the best introduction, according to devotee Luke Turner, co-founder of music website the Quietus. “When I’ve seen her live I’ve been in tears, and time goes weird,” he says.

Why had I not gone back to Galás after that gig? On paper she offers a lot of what I like: weird, imperious, glam, politically radical – and, with those incredible pipes, fusing opera with Middle Eastern modal scales and black metal babble. But I admit I don’t really understand opera, or operatic things. My brain is tuned to repetition, and Galás’s music demands that I sit down and listen closely.

“She’s the sort of artist where you have to focus – it’s not background music,” Luke advises. He got the chance to interview Galás in the early 00s and prepared by spending a weekend immersed in her records. Unfortunately, “it was when I was splitting up with my then wife, in a half-empty flat – it was a real psychic rinsing. But it was good, it worked.”

I try to focus on the elements that appeal to me: notes of blues, goth, punk, free jazz and experimental composition. Over her 50-year career she’s collaborated with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on The Sporting Life (a soft no from me, as a committed Zep-hater) and path-breaking composer Iannis Xenakis, on N’Shima, an abstract piece for mezzo-sopranos, horns, trombones and cello (a massive yes, with my Wire-reading hat on).

Luke points me towards industrial Galás – particularly The Divine Punishment, from a trilogy of records about the Aids crisis released in 1986, when the disease was still heavily stigmatised and barely understood. “I think she found the goth scene incredibly homophobic,” he notes. And this is the stuff: spooky, bizarre, confrontational and compositionally out-there – a soundtrack to a real-life horror movie.

Finally, he guides me to her 2008 version of the Appalachian folk song O Death, where her floor-shaking melismatic vocals seem to channel something ancient and terrible, like Rosalía summoning Cthulhu. What more could you want?