Ethereal Artists Saint Avangeline, Karissa Love, and Max Madly Enchant The Roxy Theater in Los Angeles

Hauntingly beautiful metal maidens! Music artist Saint Avangeline began her live Mortal Genesis Tour in Los Angeles at the Roxy Theater on October 19. Her openers were beat poet and multimedia sensation, Karissa Love, and the show-stopping punk singer Max Madly. I had the privilege of both attending the show and conversing with both Saint Avangeline and Karissa Love beforehand. The show was a unique and memorable experience for those who attended, as its smaller Sunset Strip atmosphere made you feel a part of the artists’ inspirational stories. 

Karissa Love performed first, showcasing her personal collection of poetry with live instrumental accompaniment by Elliott Woodbridge, her producer, who also plays in her studio recordings. Her performance was entrancing, and her presence commanded the attention of the crowd while dressed in medieval revival style by Firefly Path from head to toe. Her Instagram handle is @the_lovewitch__, which is fitting as she herself is magically full of artistic passion.

When asked about her creative process and inspirations, Karissa Love said she is “kind of like a divine channel, and I’ll get a spiritual download and hear a line (of poetry). Sometimes the whole poem will come to me. For my poem, “I Will Not Go To Mars With You,” I shot up out of bed at three o’clock in the morning and just heard it in my head.”

“I have a tendency to write about suppression of passion or of the soul, or being misunderstood, things like that tend to come out in my writing in different ways,” Karissa Love says. “Beat Poetry inspires my work, specifically Patti Smith and Jim Morrison, who introduced that world of the beatniks of the 60s to me. But as far as words and language, I love lyricism, and I think that’s why I lean towards Beat Poetry, because I love the combination of language and music. … Some of my favorite lyricists are Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine. I love how spiritually charged her lyrics are. I love Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Fiona Apple; a lot of 90s girlies.”

Karissa Love’s performance consisted of only one track of her first poetry album, Metamorphosis, released in 2024. The rest of the poems presented were entirely new or unreleased work, which is an exciting new chapter for the artist. “I recently had a single come out with Sam Avangeline called “Strange” that we’re going to perform together … We made “Strange” the day we met, so we have this time capsule of the day,” Karissa says. The performance of “Strange” was chill-worthy as Karissa Love’s classic ethereal words were cut through with Saint Avangeline’s piercing vocal melody. Karissa Love’s new EP debuted at this performance, along with the announcement of the album name, All Creatures in the Realm of Earth. “With this EP, specifically, I wrote over half of it while I was binge-watching Game of Thrones. So there’s a lot of undertones of politics told through a lens of fantasy and folktale. It’s a little bit different than Metamorphosis, which was more autobiographical.”

Max Madly performed next with a quite different vibe. She and her band brought forth the metal and punk elements that mirror Saint Avangeline’s current inspirations. Max Madly was a captivating goth performer whose stage presence was ghostly and electric. The ideas she presented were underscored in personal truth, stating “Free Iran and Palestine from the systems that oppress them,” while introducing a song in her Persian mother tongue. Haunting the space with her awe-inducing presence and hard-hitting band backing her, Max Madly kept the energy and spirits high amongst the delighted crowd.

The main event, Saint Avangeline, soon followed with an ethereal set interwoven with metal sound and blood-curdling screams that were a welcome release for audience members. “My metal album, Inferno, I would describe as like ethereal chaos. I’m very attracted to polar opposites of things, and so it’s been cool to figure out how to combine both ethereal and metal elements in my music,” Saint Avangeline says.

“My first two albums that I made were written about my trauma, and things that I had gone through that were very painful. That was my release. The challenge recently has been that I’m in this mode where I’m really happy and in love. So I’m trying to figure out how to write from this different place now. I have a song that’s about to drop next week that’s my first-ever love song. I’ve been trying to delve into pulling from a different part of my heart and my soul to write my music,” Saint Avangeline said. Her new track “Rain Dance” is out now! Saint Avangeline and her company were undeniably themselves as creatives on stage and through sharing their respective passions and experiences.

“I plan on performing almost my entire body of work, so basically all of Gardener of Eden, my first album, and then my sophomore album, Inferno, and then I have some of my most recent singles that I put out that I’ll be playing, and perhaps a few unreleased in between,” said Saint Avangeline. She expressed her nervousness to me about performing in front of a crowd; “I’ve never performed my entire discography back to back before; I only just recently sang Gardener of Eden for the first time.” Nevertheless, her performance was wholly and expertly theatrical and visually captivating.

Her visuals are inspired by a variety of fantasy digital games; “my target goal is to have almost this dark fantasy vibe from a video game I’m very inspired by; this old DS game called Bravely Default. It’s one of my favorites. I grew up playing it, and I love the artwork from it. I love the really ethereal parts of this game, like Skyrim or even Final Fantasy, Saint Avangeline says. “I’m a very visual person. I definitely think in color. I feel very intensely about certain things, and a lot of the time, depending on the emotion, it’ll be like a very specific color or a very specific scene for my songs in my head. I usually work within a color palette to create my music.”

In terms of musical inspiration, she said, “Most recently, I have been inspired by Paul Simon. I love how he storytells within his music, same with Ben Gibbard from the Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie.” Saint Avangeline says. “My forever inspiration for my vocals and that ethereal quality to my music is Hitomi Kuroishi. She’s a Japanese singer.” She tells a story with both her lyrics and stage presence while emphasizing the importance of storytelling as an artist, as noted within our interview. 

She writes in many literary allusions for her songs, and she explains that “the big thing for my allusions is that all of my music is written about specific emotions that I’m feeling. And a lot of the time, I have a really hard time just saying outright what it is like, I’m depressed. Those feelings feel like so much more than that statement, and they are so much more than that. So, I try to think of an image that is as grand as what it feels like to feel those emotions.” 

“My target audience was initially lesbians. All of my music has been written about and for women, non-binary lesbians, and queer women. It was so cool to get to be a voice and have other lesbians relate to and resonate with what I was making. For example, my song, “Lilith,” blew up and ended up reaching so many people. I think there’s also something really special about speaking about my experiences, especially as a queer woman, but then also speaking to people from so many different backgrounds who also resonate and relate in their own way. I think that’s a really cool way to build community,” Saint Avangeline said. The crowd itself was filled with a variety of genders, age groups, and communities, showing how music and art are a bridge of connection.

Saint Avangeline will be performing the last leg of her Mortal Genesis tour on November 1 at The Masquerade in Atlanta, Georgia. Tickets can be bought at saintavangelinemusic.com.