In 1988, with America's AIDS death toll at 46,000 and antivirals still years away, Diamanda Galás released You Must Be Certain of the Devil, the final installment of her Masque of the Red Death trilogy. Her brother Philip had died of AIDS-related illness in 1986. She had been attending Act Up protests. Critics dismissed her as "the AIDS lady," unwilling to reckon with what she was actually doing: creating a work she described as "begun in 1984 and not completed until the end of the epidemic." No closure. No comfort. The eternal present of trauma.

The album opens with a vocal alarm call that leaves no room for distance. What follows is not "dark" music but illumination so total it leaves nowhere to hide. Galás takes gospel spirituals - Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Double-Barrel Prayer, Birds of Death - and détourns them into indictments. She uses sacred forms to expose churches that damned AIDS sufferers as cursed by God. These are prayers to a god invented by despair, performed by someone who calls herself a "Greek Orthodox atheist": certain of the devil, with no hope in God.

Co-produced with Gareth Jones, the album weaponizes Galás's four-octave voice through extended techniques that span operatic precision, guttural eruption, whispered menace, and sustained electronic-sounding tones. She performs as multiple entities: victim, accuser, witness, and the virus itself. The sounds are adequate to the horror being documented—necessity, not avant-garde exploration. The trilogy moved from anguish (The Divine Punishment, 1986) to political knowledge (Saint of the Pit, 1986) to uncompromising confrontation. You Must Be Certain of the Devil makes no attempt at consolation. It pins you against a wall and makes you look at what the virus visited upon a person—the knowledge of certain death in a hostile environment, the abandonment by institutions claiming to protect. A swaggering, furious fuck-you to those who cast aside the sick and dying in the name of faith and scripture.

The 2025 reissue features audio remastered by Heba Kadry, vinyl lacquers cut by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering, and photography by Emily Andersen. The remastering preserves the rawness essential to the work while revealing additional layers of detail. This is not an archival document. It continues to operate in present tense—still urgent, still necessary, still refusing the comfort of distance or resolution.