South African musician and vocalist Mia van Wyk has spent the past decade recording as Hunter As a Horse, or HAAH, releasing a varied succession of electronic dark-pop singles and EPs from her base in the Western Cape. Her songs have often carried the scale of miniature films: private crises placed against large backdrops, with synthesizers, programmed rhythms, and van Wyk’s coolly controlled voice providing both the setting and its unsettled central presence.
After signing with Metropolis Records earlier this year, HAAH has released her long-awaited debut album, Paradise Lost. The record moves between alternative pop, indie electronics, dream-pop, dance music, and nu-goth, shifting from propulsive tracks to slower, more spacious pieces without losing its sense of internal unity.
For an artist whose earlier releases frequently operated as independent worlds, the album represents a considerable change in scale. Its songs belong to the same emotional period and circle a connected set of concerns: death, addiction, CPTSD, astral visions, magical thinking, and the uneasy business of examining the parts of oneself that polite society recommends keeping out of view.
“This album deals with my shadow, my transformation and my inner architecture,” says van Wyk. “I have tried to show what is deep inside myself. I discovered that the things I was taught to bury were never my enemies, but are actually my power.”
The language of Paradise Lost is grand without becoming remote. Van Wyk thinks in terms of ruins, crowns, monsters, resurrection, and revenge, yet these images remain tied to recognizable psychological experience. The record’s supernatural vocabulary offers a way of discussing survival without reducing it to a tidy lesson or a reassuring conclusion.
Propelled by a taut dance beat, the darkwave-driven title track coils through the album’s broad dynamic range. The video places Hunter as a Horse in a garage workshop, singing directly into the camera with rows of tools behind her. Grainy black-and-white footage of Appalachian serpent-handling worship cuts through the performance, showing congregants praying, dancing, raising snakes, and collapsing in religious ecstasy as temptation, danger, faith, and salvation converge.
Watch the video for the title track below:
Styles change, tempos contract and accelerate, but the songs on Paradise Lost appear to share the same architecture, as though each opens onto a different room in a vast, faintly dangerous house. Van Wyk’s interest in misunderstood figures also supplies the album with its moral logic. She looks toward people and creatures traditionally cast as threats, studying the injuries and adaptations concealed inside their reputations.
“A lot changed for me during that time personally and I went through a kind of integration process where I started confronting things more,” she elaborates. “Writing the album felt like a natural expression of that. In the past, I often struggled to bring songs together because they felt too different, but this time everything came from a similar emotional place and period in my life.”
With her inspiration often stemming from unusual sources, van Wyk reveals that “I have always been drawn to the villains in stories, the ones who were feared and misunderstood, and I have often found beauty in places other people are afraid to look – the strange, the haunted, the macabre. Some people see monsters. I see stories. I see what survived. I see how it transformed. This album is resurrection, obsession, desire, revenge, surrender, love and my shadow. I don’t believe darkness is always something to be destroyed. Sometimes it’s the only part of you strong enough to save you. This album isn’t about conventional ‘healing’. It’s about walking out of the ruins wearing the crown.”
Listen to Paradise Lost below and order the album here.
Paradise Lost by Hunter As a Horse
The foundations of Paradise Lost can be traced to Anathema, the 2025 EP on which van Wyk first began treating separate songs as parts of a larger design. That release encouraged her to think beyond the single as an isolated statement and toward the album as a sustained act of disclosure.
“It was the first time I really started thinking in terms of a connected body of work, so it felt natural to take that further with ‘Paradise Lost’, she explains. “It is designed to be heard as one piece, even though the songs are quite different individually.”
HAAH’s music has already appeared in American Horror Story, Riverdale, and Elite, as well as the film Wander Darkly and several international advertising campaigns. With Paradise Lost, van Wyk finally gathers the breadth of that work into a full-length record, finding order among obsessions that once seemed too unruly to occupy the same space.
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