Chelsea Wolfe - Siren of the Abyss

Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento
(“Ladybird” – Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Statuesque, long raven hair hiding her face, a milky pallor to her skin, and pale eyes dramatically rimmed with heavy layers of eyeliner. The nineteenth-century grace of an Emily Brontë heroine married to the shadowy allure of a gothic-era priestess. This is how, on the eve of the new millennium, Chelsea Joy Wolfe introduced herself to the world — from Sacramento, that corner of California where religious conformism and buttoned-up respectability often smother the postcard-ready hedonism with which the West Coast's promised land is so forcibly identified. Just look at the autobiographical film mentioned above, “Ladybird”, in which director Greta Gerwig drops her alter ego Saoirse Ronan into that alienating, provincial setting precisely to break free of its constraints, with decidedly fraught results.
Who knows if Chelsea Joy felt the same way. What's certain is the artistic record she has built in little more than a decade. There's no doubt that, in today's “neo-dark” landscape and beyond, the Californian musician — with her distinctive “drone-metal-art-folk” approach — has managed to stand out and rise on the strength of her own talent, striking straight at the heart of music critics while captivating an extremely varied audience with her evocative live performances. Credit goes to a magnetic voice — endowed with an esoteric energy and lightning-fast shifts in register — and to an eclecticism capable of navigating a thicket of sonic and aesthetic currents that today recover and reinterpret, through a kind of “post-apocalyptic spleen,” elements of gothic culture, black metal atmospheres and apocalyptic folk in the vein of Swans.
Sacramento's dark lady seems to have found her own path toward a success and popularity she often never even sought, but which she has thoroughly earned. A steady evolution that now seems to have swept away even the last doubts about her status as muse and icon for a new generation dressed in black.

Casio-based gothy R&B

Chelsea Wolfe was born in Sacramento in 1983. The daughter of a musician (her father was a country singer), she started writing songs at the age of nine, in a style she herself has described as “Casio-based gothy R&B.”
Her first proper album, “Mistake In Parting,” recorded in 2006, left her thoroughly unsatisfied: “It was embarrassingly bad,” she would later admit without mincing words. The record was never released, and Chelsea took a break to focus on writing new music.
After a transitional, still-unripe effort like Soundtrack VHS/Gold for Jeune Été Records (limited to just 30 CD copies, later partially reissued on Bandcamp in a darker, more reverb-drenched mix titled Soundtrack VHS II), her true full-length debut arrived with The Grime And The Glow (2010). Released on Pendu Sound Recordings, the album serves up a blend of dark droning doom, gothic ghosts and lo-fi blues. Even the title of a track like “Cousins Of The Antichrist” — essentially the dream-folk of Marissa Nadler flung into a circle of hell — makes clear from the outset where this is headed. It's no coincidence that the same year also saw a striking cover of “Black Spell Of Destruction” by black metal musician Burzum, which shows exactly what imagery and what tracks — hardly mainstream ones — Wolfe is running on.
Her debt to the darkwave era is evident in tracks like the tense “Advice & Vices” (close to the post-punk of early Siouxsie), the claustrophobic “Moses” and the brooding “Fang,” whose measured, booming cadences stir up the ghosts of The Cure's “Pornography.”
And while “Benjamin” and “Widow” still stick to the model of a folky, catacomb-like litany, “Deep Talk” is a wild shard of distorted noise-rock that reveals Chelsea Joy's sharper, more jagged side.

Apocalypse folk

But it's with Ἀποκάλυψις from 2010, also circulated as Apokalypsis, that Wolfe's ingredients start to coalesce properly, gradually emerging from the suffocating underground dimension in which they had been confined until then. In particular, it's “Moses” — reworked from the previous record and presented in a new form — that pulls everything forward and opens the waters toward the future. An inspired vision of apocalypse folk that feeds on the work of Swans and Jarboe, a singer to whom Wolfe is something of a spiritual heir. A track that has since become famous, “Pale On Pale,” proves the point. In this very song, post-depressive-metal clangor and suggestions coexist with gloomy atmospheres that will later spill into the black-ambient haunted by drowned ghosts of “To The Forest, Towards The Sea.” The Luciferian hiss of “Primal/Carnal,” meanwhile, is nothing less than the (damned) soul of Diamanda Galas surfacing in the background (and it's also evoked by the unsettling cover art).
Legend has it that Chelsea wrote these songs on her mother's old classical guitar, which was apparently missing a tuning peg. Because of that, the guitar was tuned to lower pitches, a trait of these early albums that meshed perfectly with Wolfe's distinctive vocal timbre. Comparisons to PJ Harvey's singing (see, for instance, the raw tones of “Mer”) and to the witch-house electronic currents fashionable at the time (the pulsing “The Wasteland”) feel a bit off the mark and superficial, when viewed in a wider perspective tied not just to indie music and the fortunes of a certain strain of electronic music whose popularity lasted perhaps no more than a single season.
A handful of tracks whose dark substance simply brushed aside the many comparisons to the goth wreckage favored by many of her peers. And with those peers — increasingly keen to cleanse themselves of claustrophobic excess in favor of more accessible, popular textures (first and foremost Nika Roza Danilova, aka Zola Jesus) — the Californian songwriter shares not an ounce of approach or outcome, and above all, she shows no intention of giving such a serene turn to her existential burdens, well summed up by the distorted invective of “Demons,” somewhere between Siouxsie and Sonic Youth.

In 2011 Chelsea Wolfe set off on an American and European tour that immediately drew a strong response, both critically and from audiences. Her Live At Roadburn, released the following year, is proof enough of the evocative impact of her live shows. During performances, the Californian artist uses a black veil to screen her face, which she says comes from the anxiety and discomfort of standing on stage. Her long black hair, too, often covers her face like a kind of mask. All of this has surely helped build a mysterious aura that, combined with the singer's thinness and pallor, quickly turned her into a neo-dark icon of the 2010s, on a par with Karin Dreijer Andersson in her Fever Ray guise. They are two major artists, “anti-divas” very different in style and substance, who nonetheless each construct, in their own way, a hypnagogic, phantasmagoric imagery — at times referential — that goes beyond the purely musical. That may well be where the effective use of their songs in soundtracks (“Vikings,” “Game Of Thrones,” etc.) comes from, without necessarily having to invoke the usual David Lynch. Even a video like “Mer,” directed by Zev Deans, weaving together references to “The Seventh Seal,” cult horror classics and runic symbolism, has definitively helped build the fame and mythology of the American singer, helping her overcome her shyness and reticence.

Acoustic ghosts

At this point Wolfe signed with Sargent House Records and released in 2012 Unknown Rooms: A Collection Of Acoustic Songs, a solid album that perhaps doesn't reach the heights of Apokalypsis, but still proves inspired and focused, thanks to strong songwriting — the work of a true singer-songwriter — that veers toward a decadent, melancholy folk haunted by ghosts. Listen again to tracks like “Boyfriend” and “Virginia Woolf Underwater” (the latter dating back to the Soundtrack VHS days) to understand that this isn't an easy, immediately gratifying record, but one that rewards repeated listens.
The musician's wandering through her own soul grows no more jagged or adventurous here; if anything, it lets in a faint ray of light, just enough to sharpen the outlines and smooth the edges slightly more than expected. Because of this, the perceptible shadows and nuances become indispensable elements in shaping the nine tracks (mostly brief fragments adding up to barely twenty-five minutes in total), and the form tailored for them feels like the only one possible.
“A Collection Of Acoustic Songs,” as the second half of the long title reminds us, and with such a premise one can move with greater confidence (or caution, depending on the listener) toward a precise listening experience. Having shed most of the robust post-punk and gothic echoes that ran through the bleak fables of the previous album, what emerges is a leaner, more folk-oriented form of that same music, trimmed with acoustic guitar (precisely) and little else, on which to weave a tribute to her own roots.
Reminiscent of her very first attempts at songwriting, at age nine in her father's North Carolina farmhouse, Wolfe's unknown rooms smell of fog and haze, revealing their arcane charm while still turning pitch-black, as in the masterpiece-track “Appalachia,” a passionate recollection of the lands and woods of her childhood, carried by its gripping guitar line and the beat of its percussion. Elsewhere, the purity of the arpeggios, with a temperament reminiscent of Nadler, allows the artist's elastic expressiveness to reveal its many facets, lending the spare tracks a thousand possible shades of meaning (the dark kiss of “Spinning Centers,” “Flatlands”). And it's in the floating quality of Chelsea's voice — at times a damned soul (as in the airy, if inconclusive, interlude titled “I Died With You”), at times a hypnotic muse — that the secret behind the whole operation shines through. Far more than her writing, which isn't always flawless, it's her performances, with a charisma that resists easy classification, that ensnare the listener in their trembling dialogue.
Even when the contemplative mood slips into the psychedelic languor of “Hyper Oz,” close to the sacredness of Tara Burke, or conjures haunted manors in the deafening creak of piano on “Sunstorm,” Wolfe's extraordinary lyrical command lets her mask an inspiration that occasionally flags, and ultimately to captivate within the seductive grip of her embrace. Try closing your eyes: the spell cast upon you won't take long to work.

Beauty in pain

2013 turns out to be a particularly good year for Wolfe: out comes Pain Is Beauty, an album before which even the last holdouts among the more skeptical critics finally have to surrender. It's an excellent record, fusing Cranes-like suggestions with delicate, often gloomy and melancholy nocturnal settings, through a post-metal-folk that opens up to a wide range of sonic dimensions, spanning electronic music, post-metal and folk. Meticulously detailed and well produced, the album is devoted for the most part to suffering, idealized forms of love.
Across her three previous albums, the Sacramento songwriter had been visibly drawn to pain and anguish: the noisy tribulations of Apokalypsis and the claustrophobic hypnosis of Unknown Rooms: A Collection Of Acoustic Songs laid out the coordinates of an apology for pain, embracing a dark-music generation that had been waiting years for new sonic messiahs. Pain Is Beauty betrays, even in its title, the intention to give not just aesthetic but also physical form to the American artist's introspective, mesmerizing poetics: like a new Siouxsie, she fuses post-rock and gothic rock without losing sight of the folk roots and psychedelic nuances needed to hold it all together.
More visceral, yet still rich in poetry and melancholy, the album offers more varied songwriting, even though Wolfe hasn't yet fully matured as a writer; still, the emotional tension and sonic architecture remain rich with intricate energy. The desire to break out of the underground ghetto without abandoning the lyrical and musical content that has won over a sizeable following worldwide is plain to see, just as it's clear the artist is finally ready to face new chimeras.
The good news is that Chelsea Wolfe has made her maudit poetry denser and more full-blooded: the ice has melted into blood (“We Hit A Wall”), the electronic flirtations now carry the colors of a noir fantasy blending This Mortal Coil and Vangelis (“Sick”), and the melancholy settles over ethereal, timeless harmonies (“They'll Clap When You're Gone”). The emotional crescendo of piano, voice and drum machine on “The Waves Have Come” is a delight that brings the album's title into sharp focus, but it's the dream-folk of “Reins” that stands as the record's most intense, compelling manifesto, with voices and orchestration layering into a hall of sonic mirrors worthy of Cocteau Twins.
A few tracks, like “Kings” and “Ancestors, The Ancients,” pay an overly heavy tribute to the Banshees, and “Destruction Makes The World Burn Brighter” evokes Sonic Youth minus their sheen: these are venial sins that no Chelsea Wolfe album ever seems able to avoid. On the other hand, the single “The Warden” teases with its Moroder-style pulse, while “House Of Metal” slides toward a less somber romanticism, hinting at new possible directions for the American artist.
With Pain Is Beauty, in short, Chelsea Wolfe is finally ready to leave behind her status as a cult musician, without betraying any of the cultural and stylistic premises of her artistic path: a decisive step toward maturity.

2013 also brings the release of the split 7” Chelsea Wolfe & King Dude ‎– Sing Songs Together… in which the Californian singer collaborates with King Dude, American neofolk musician, sharing a common aesthetic sensibility, somewhere between Death In June, goth-rock and a rugged western imagery, as well as a genuine love of reverb. After all, Wolfe and King Dude are two kindred "dark" souls who were bound to meet and work together.
The experiment pays off and is repeated the following year with Sing More Songs Together, this time released on Not Just Religious Music.
The Pain Is Beauty tour leads Wolfe to collaborate with Chicago post-metal band Russian Circles, kicking off a fruitful partnership that will also see guitarist Mike Sullivan contribute to her new album.

Under a Metal Moon

On August 7, 2015, the new album for Sargent House arrives, Abyss, dedicated to the abysses of time, a backward glance that seeks to probe the depths of the psyche: human fragility, intimacy, anxiety, desire, but also a melancholy, dark look at the subconscious, with particular attention to the hypnagogic moments of existence and the dark sides of our present (listen to "Iron Moon", a song inspired by the suicide of Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker).

Inspired by reading Carl Gustav Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" and produced by John Congleton, Abyss is yet another step in the evolution of Wolfe's apocalyptic drone-metal-art-folk, and it brings her singing even closer to Jarboe's.
It's the crowning achievement of a journey. The Siouxsie-style goth-rock suggestions and the This Mortal Coil-like evanescence were the cardiac trace onto which modest doses of noise and chill-out folk were grafted. An energetic, painful resurrection that finds its fixed point in Abyss. The spacious sonic architecture, in which melancholy, poetry, fear, suffering and sacrifice fought for a partial victory, has now become malleable and rough, drawing on some of the most exciting pages of post-rock and even introducing the hardcore and industrial of Swans — and it's precisely in this unexpected turn toward noise that lies the key to Wolfe's new album.
The songwriting is also more confident and mature: the slight defaillances of the otherwise excellent predecessor are set aside in favour of more complex, more structured songs, where the climax no longer lies in background hypnosis but is harnessed to a mesmeric force that borders on terror, pinning the listener to their deepest fears.
It's a physical, urgent album, yet also deeply intimate and dark. A nightmare that takes shape and becomes a dream, as when the enveloping lyricism of "Maw" is disturbed by light slaps to its gentle underlying melody, or when the acoustic fury of "Crazy Love" is shaped by violin notes that sound like an alien arpeggio.
Abyss is also the first album on which the term stand-out classic applies to a good three or four compositions. The opening "Carrion Flowers" is one of the most thrilling tracks of the year, all guitar feedback, doom pulses, shards of industrial and claustrophobic rhythms hailing the soul's descent into the darkness of the abyss. Omens of a bloody, cruel defeat that "Color Of Blood" renders even more harrowing before the final collapse, with noise textures and landscapes duelling relentlessly.
Wolfe sacrifices her late-Romantic side, her voice grows harsher and more uncertain, almost afraid to give in to melancholy on the seductive, dreamlike "Simple Death", while on "After The Fall" she frays the melody, scratching and whispering it, amplifying the song's poetic force, polishing it into a diamond of rare beauty.
Cascades of doom metal intertwine with chanted vocal transgressions ("Iron Moon"), leaden riffs set to music the desperate cries of damned souls seeking redemption ("Dragged Out"), shards of past dream-pop resurface ("Grey Days"), and folk's anthropological force takes on blues and soul hues, bringing the voice back to the centre of emotional nemesis ("Survive"), before the abyss brings down the curtain with neoclassical deconstructions that carry the sinister allure of a horror film.

The appeal of Abyss is not only enveloping but also sharp and blazing: it won't take you any time to grasp its power, it will drag you into its vortex with the funereal tolling of its bells and its unsettling electro textures, until it drains your dreams and your soul dry. Welcome to hell.

Troubled Sleep

2017 brings its worthy successor: Hiss Spun, released on Sargent House, features several guest contributions, including Troy Van Leeuwen, guitarist of Queens Of The Stone Age, and Aaron Turner of Old Man Gloom. As the Sacramento artist put it: "I wanted to write a sort of escapist music, songs centred on being in tune with your own body and feeling free". Here Wolfe stages a sonic and aesthetic identity that is readily recognisable and direct. If the previous album had been a journey through nocturnal paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations, now it's time to wake up, to become consciously aware of one's own possibilities.
Musically, the new record carries on from the last one, in a funereal blend of doom and drone metal but with a gothic sensibility drawn from post-Swans apocalyptic folk. A little less tense and incisive than Abyss, Hiss Spun continues its dark trajectory, between stylistic refinements and glimpses of a new dawn that slips away behind heavy black curtains. Both albums are haunted by the ghosts of childhood, the anxieties tied to sleep paralysis, a disorder Chelsea suffered from as a child.
"16 Psyche" delivers inspired sludge drift while narrating inner demons never fully tamed ("Let me wrap you up in these thighs/ It gets me out of my head again"). Amid claustrophobic moments and anguished sighs, there emerges a strong urge to push back against the hardships of the present and one's own personal ghosts: here the display of pain becomes a catharsis and potentially an escape route.
Having been recorded by Kurt Ballou (also guitarist of Converge) in Salem, Massachusetts, probably helped tip the balance of the record further toward post-metal: listen, for instance, to the opener "Spun", with Troy Van Leeuwen's cutting riffs, as well as the excellent "Vex", which features the growl vocals of Sumac (ex-Isis) frontman Aaron Turner. "The Culling", after the post-industrial intro of "Strain", is a fascinating atmospheric track that progressively builds on distortions reminiscent of "Iron Moon". Like "16 Psyche", this song too tells of relationships gone very wrong ("I am depleted by love") and demons hidden in the murkiest recesses of the unconscious.
The American artist once again proves adept at juggling introspective, gloomy moments with noisy explosions, as on "Twin Fawn", or lingering over passages dense with apocalyptic visions, as in "Offering", where she tells us: "A thousand lives lived in circles, a planet burning at the seams/ Skeletal sand as a lesson, that became an offering".
When Wolfe picks up the acoustic guitar on "Two Spirit" we find ourselves surrounded by the gothic ghosts of Pain Is Beauty, navigating by sight between folk and darkwave atmospheres. Here one might also recall, if only for a moment, her long-standing partnership with the dark soul of King Dude. Worth noting is the closer, the surprising "Scrape", a track worthy of a PJ Harvey converted to gothic-rock.
Hiss Spun is yet another confirmation that darkness has its queen, and while this latest album doesn't quite (by a hair) reach the peaks of despair found on Abyss, it will certainly manage to break your heart into a thousand pieces.

The Mother Road

Two years later comes Birth Of Violence (2019). And there she is, Chelsea Joy, ruthless priestess dressed in black, brandishing and raising a dagger. Ready to deliver the fatal blow of a sacrifice. Wrapped in the clouds of the spectral artwork, she re-enacts the gruesome founding rite of countless human cults. A sign of the eternal, deep-rooted interconnection between humanity and violence.
Practically the perfect theme for the doom-metal coils of Abyss and Hiss Spun, which wrap around you until they strangle. And yet, ever unpredictable, never accommodating, the Sacramento artist bets everything this time on acoustic arrangements, for an elegiac, skeletal on-the-road dark-folk, with gloomy gusts of strings sketching its longest shadows. Concessions to electricity are made only on the dusty single "Deranged For Rock & Roll" and on the poignant, wonderful "The Mother Road", songs that are nonetheless free of riffs, with the guitars producing reverb and apocalyptic shading rather than hooks.
"American Darkness" is an almost sweet track, its pace set by a shy, dust-laden strumming, with gentle keyboard touches making everything even more languid. Backed by an even more evanescent arrangement, the title track sees Chelsea's voice soar unburdened in beguiling, siren-like trills. Practically an ethereal number — and not the only one, either; also belonging to that company is the magnificent "Be All Things", a litany steeped in the esotericism of Dead Can Dance (though lacking their hypnotic charge), which culminates in a fleeting ascent through clouds and heavenly light. The more menacing "Erde" starts from the usual dragging acoustic guitar arpeggios, but soon veers toward dangerous ritual rhythms worthy of an earth witch; while the beguiling call of "When Anger Turns To Honey" is only seemingly harmless.
Equally successful are the gothic settings of the "Little Grave" and "Preface To A Dream Play" pairing, both misty, haunted by sinister winds and chilling otherworldly drones.
Closer to her early work than to her most recent albums, closer to the more minimal compositions of Emma Ruth Rundle and Marissa Nadler than to the force of Swans and Anna Von Hausswolff, Birth Of Violence lets us savour shades of Chelsea Wolfe's voice that had until now remained hidden beneath landslides of guitar and other sonic terrors. It's also a risky record, and it doesn't seem impossible that it will end up alienating some fans less inclined toward unhurried tempos and almost entirely acoustic orchestration.
Chelsea Wolfe doesn't always bewitch as much as she'd like ("Dirt Universe", and "When Anger Turns To Honey" itself), but overall she scores another hit, one with the added merit of the courage to break with the recent past.
The sonic metamorphosis of Birth Of Violence foreshadows the complex process of recovery from alcohol dependency, a path that also intersects with new artistic challenges. The first is an album made in collaboration with Jess Gowrie under the name Mrs Piss; "Self-Surgery" picks up the atmospheres of Hiss Spun with an unusual lo-fi approximation. Quite different is the metalcore adventure shared with Converge: "Bloodmoon: I" is a record that witnesses the sacrifice of some of its protagonists' trademarks, and the result is shattering, rich in fervour and a noir spirituality that leaves no one indifferent. While not quite living up to expectations, the soundtrack for "X", shared with Tyler Bates, keeps anticipation high for Chelsea Wolfe's new album, which finally sees the light in February 2024.

It's not easy to place She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She (2024) within the already imperfect mosaic of the Sacramento songwriter's work. Predictability has never been a feature of this American artist's world, and while her post-industrial nature hasn't changed, it has taken on new connotations. Darkness and dread remain Chelsea Wolfe's language of choice, and although the almost metal final scratch tries to tell an already familiar story, "Whispers In The Echo Chamber" opens the dance, building a bridge between past and present, with a renewed pull toward a horror-drama infected by trip-hop rhythms in the vein of Portishead. It's as if the Californian artist had discovered new expressive forms of terror: fog and smoke have given way to dust ("The Liminal") and landscapes paved with sharp blades of ice ("Eyes Like Nightshade").
A skilled and seasoned storyteller, Chelsea Wolfe steps authoritatively into the world of Massive Attack with sinuous, sensual trip-hop sounds ("Salt"), infusing songs of unexpected romantic sweep with nostalgia and drama ("Tunnel Lights"), and embracing darkness with electronic textures that tear through the fog (the splendid "Everything Turns Blue"). Amid new shades of noir and bewitching oddities, like the heavy tread of "Unseen World" and the searing electro-rock-noise driven by the powerful rhythms of "House Of Self-Undoing", Chelsea Wolfe keeps telling stories of terror and fear, tales no longer born of imagination but of a tangible reality ("Place In The Sun").
She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is a thunderous sonic body delivering a scratching, carnal final blow capable of tearing through mind and body, finding its apotheosis in the closing notes of "Dusk".

2026 brings the release of a new record, The Dark, whose title refers to a difficult period in which Chelsea Wolfe had to put herself back at the centre of her own life, rather than squander her energy on others. That tunnel seems to have been left behind, because the album radiates a light that is often comforting, drawing back on some of the gothic-folk tones tied to her work from the last decade, but with a pop candour dictated by a fairly linear, clean production: that's the case with tracks like "Cold" or the title track, two enveloping caresses. Still, there's no shortage of more electric passages, especially when the songwriting opts for a more elaborate path, alternating acoustic fragments with that sonic intensity we know all too well. "Death Is Not The End" and "Swallower" (which once again sees her team up with Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens Of The Stone Age) are set to become two gems of her repertoire, including live.
The album, then, doesn't continue along the electronic experimentation of her previous work, but instead tries to recover the formula of the past, filtering it through more easily digestible elements (with an eye, too, on a wider audience). 

Riding the "hype tiger" while remaining detached and coolly distant from the glamour that so often infects the music business, Chelsea Wolfe has built up a substantial following, earned the hard way, thanks in part to a post-apocalyptic spleen that has by now become a sign of our times, at least for those who refuse to bow to the digital dictatorship of the here and now. Her ability to turn forms of existential unease into a sonic "black banner" obviously sets her apart, but that alone isn't enough: Wolfe's musical journey is the emblem of a rise that is thoroughly deserved, steeped in commitment and dedication to the cause.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis ("Unknown Rooms: A Collection Of Acoustic Songs"), Michele Corrado ("Birth Of Violence") and Paolo Chemnitz ("The Dark")

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