You ever feel like sometimes
You’re born just to be sacrificed
Mothers bore the chosen ones
Blood will run from your hands and crosses
H.Ä.L.T.’s “Hands & Crosses” arrives like a fever that found a camera and decided to tell its side of the story. The Vancouver outfit drags you straight into its underworld without explanation, and frankly, explanations would only get in the way. This thing moves with the blunt authority of a ritual enacted long before electricity, a ceremony lit by fear, devotion, and whatever burns hottest in the human gut.
The video opens with a body washed onto the shore: alive, barely, and carrying a kind of resolve that feels older than memory. SALMIAKKI’s cinematography gives the moment a raw immediacy: the sea clings, the air bites, the world seems ready to swallow or save depending on the tilt of a heartbeat. The figure rises, shivering but stubborn, and begins a wandering trek into the treeline. No heroic arc, no heroic posture—just someone who looks like they’ve survived something terrible, only to discover the land ahead holds its own brand of treachery.
Inside the forest, the camera treats the trees like a jury. Every branch leans with suspicion. Light slips in crooked, touching the wanderer just long enough to remind them they’re still being judged by forces unseen. There’s a cracked holiness to it all, the sort found in ruins and failed prayers. You sense the person is navigating more than terrain—memory, blame, devotion, and dread twist around them like old vines.
Cut to the band performing, and the whole thing tightens. H.Ä.L.T. play as if the song is their final breath: clipped drums, tense bass, vocals delivered like a confession spat through clenched teeth. It’s music shaped by pressure: emotional, historical, maybe even spiritual. These intercuts add weight, a reminder that whatever storm the wanderer carries is mirrored by the musicians conjuring it.
Religious symbols seep through the lyrics and visuals: rites twisted by violence, absolution denied, faith repurposed as weaponry. You feel the centuries of judgment pressing down on one impulsive decision after another. Towers rise, bones fall, healers burn. H.Ä.L.T. wrestle with that inheritance, their sound a reckoning between fury and devotion, their imagery a ledger of debts inherited from people who never learned mercy.
By the final minute, the wanderer pushes through brush and bramble with a strange kind of resolve in a world that hasn’t yet earned that endurance. The sea tried to erase them. The forest tried to confuse them. The ghosts of belief tried to turn them to ash. Still, they move.
And that’s the heart of “Hands & Crosses.” Not victory. Not clarity. Persistence: raw, human, and crawling toward whatever comes next.
Listen to Hands & Crosses below and order the single here.
H.Ä.L.T. is set to perform in Tokyo on November 17th, 2025, at Hatsudai WALL in Shinjuku.
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The post Vancouver Post-Punk Outfit H.Ä.L.T. Raise Their Wounded Banner in Video for “Hands & Crosses” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.