Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jen Maravegias | Celebrity | September 7, 2025
Named for the Slavic folk figure, Baba Yaga, The Yagas premiered their first album just in October of 2024. Their new single has a thematic tie-in to The Conjuring: Last Rites for a very good reason. The band’s front woman is Oscar and Emmy-nominated Vera Farmiga.
Her husband, Renn Hawkey (of Deadsy), Jason Bowman, Mark Visconti, and Mike Davis are also members, and her son Fynn is featured on their latest album.
Proving that she is forever a member of The Coven (iykyk) Farmiga rocks a witchy all-black outfit in most of their promo shots, along with the requisite heavy eyeliner and primal scream pose.
The sound is sort of hypnotic and psychedelic, but also borrows from classic heavy metal. It gives an Alt Metal vibe, but the lyrics and imagery are more emotional. Her statement about their first single, last year’s ‘The Crying Room’, is a lot. And the song is dedicated to the people of Ukraine:
It’s about crying your heart clean. It’s a song that was filmed during and in the aftermath of an eclipse, and is about the eclipse of our soul. Eclipses have potent effects on our psychology. They are energetic portals that trigger epiphanies and outpouring of emotion. They help us shift. Humans are capable of getting stuck in our shadows from time to time. It’s in this balancing of the shadow and light, one literally eclipsing the other, that we have an opportunity to look deep into our hearts and what is going on internally and bring that into the light, no matter how dark it is.
In the video, she looks like a spirit the Warrens would be exorcising.
Farmiga and her friend, Eugene Hütz (of Gogol Bordello), are both of Ukrainian heritage. They played together at a benefit concert for Support Action Ukraine in March of this year.
Metal is not really my genre. But honestly, I don’t hate any of this, and I can totally get behind the new single, ‘Illusion’ off The Yagas’ full-length album Midnight Minuet.
‘Illusion’ is my auditory expression of The Conjuring: Last Rights […] The Yagas wrote this song whilst I was in the ectoplasm thick of filming C4. The song emerges from a strange convergence of two events - my terrified offspring running into my bedroom, haunted by an out-of-body experience, and my on-screen child, Judy Warren, experiencing psychological torment. ‘Illusion’ is our sonic interpretation of this haunted dreamscape - the fragile space between fear and acceptance; the space where you realize that the things in your head may be much more than just your imagination.
Vera’s got pipes, that’s for sure.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is in theaters now.
