Chelsea WolfeWe’re not the first ones to point this out, but, oddly, Chelsea Wolfe hasn’t already released an album called The Dark in her storied career.
But it’s never too late for such an aptly-titled record to enter her discography. This Friday (21 August), music’s gothic queen is releasing her ninth album digitally, while the physical editions of The Dark will arrive in September.
The American singer-songwriter has long built a reputation as one of the most interesting voices in music, with albums spanning gothic rock, doom metal, experimental, noise rock, and folk.
With her latest record, Wolfe has crafted a career-spanning collection of tracks that start with acoustic guitars and tranquil vocals and evolve into something completely surprising.
Wolfe launched into the promotional campaign for The Dark with the double release of the title track and album highlight Death is Not the End in June. Both songs are great teasers for what’s to come on the album, with the focus on space between verses and choruses and only going electric when the song calls for it.
“I definitely wanted to strip things back a little bit,” Wolfe tells The Music from her home studio, decked out in her signature enchanting attire, a black Gibson SG electric guitar behind her.
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“I mean, there’s definitely a few electronic elements here and there on this record, but I intentionally sort of took that away from some of the songs and just wanted to keep them really minimal in a way.”
She adds, “But yeah, Death is Not the End, I feel like it really showcases those two sides of myself as being drawn to this acoustic, folk side of myself, and then this sort of heavier distorted side, and that song really marries the two.
“I just love that transition from one into the next, and it also just feels very indicative of the visual realm that I chose for this record, being reaching into another kind of space, like the idea of the séance, and trying to like reach into the spirit world, or the ocean, and thinking about being an angel in this kelp forest, just so peaceful. I like reaching into different worlds, and this crossover, I just felt like that song really summed that up for me.”
While The Dark finds Wolfe reuniting with her longtime collaborator, Ben Chisholm, she also recruited some new voices: co-writer Jennifer Decilveo, Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails), Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam), Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens Of The Stone Age), Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), and Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent).
Wolfe and Chisholm have worked together for years in her house, and for album #9, she craved a different space and a different collaborative energy.
“Working with Jen, it just felt like we really worked quickly together and had a commonality,” she shares. “Even just being the same age as women in the music industry, we kind of just had that in common, and that was like a language that was easy to express between us.
“I knew I wanted to literally be pulled out of my comfort zone for this record, and so, you know, I made that choice to work with someone who I felt like was going to challenge me in that way.”
Meanwhile, names such as Matt Chamberlain, Stella Mozgawa, and Justin Meldal-Johnsen are recognised for their numerous works with other artists, but by teaming up with Wolfe, her vision remained front and centre, unencumbered even by her all-star band of collaborators.
What’s immediately commanding about The Dark is how the songs feel familiar but nonetheless entrancing.
Cold opens with acoustic guitar playing and hushed vocals from Wolfe – akin to her acoustic-based record, Birth of Violence, while the following two tracks, Seethe and Humours, revisit the trip-hop, industrial metal feel of 2024’s She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She with jittering beats and stunning melodies.
“Yeah, I mean, that’s so interesting actually, now that you’re saying that. This really is like a reflection of all these different eras of my career, yeah, I can see that,” Wolfe says.
Discussing the album’s tracklisting, she admits, “I was really focused on just each song as its own thing.
“The starting point of this record was about actual songwriting and thinking about song structure and going a bit more traditional with some of the song structures, which I don’t normally focus on as much. The songs themselves started taking form, gelling together, and making sense in a weird way.
“I’m always wondering if it’s going to make sense to the outside world, because it makes sense to me, obviously, like the order that I put them in and stuff, but usually the order comes last. I would be amazed if someone wrote an album in order; that would be really impressive, actually! I’m sure someone’s done it.”
Songs like Swallower and Turn the Key, meanwhile, are packed with beautiful layers of alternative, folk-based music that gradually unfurl to introduce heavy metal elements heard in 2015’s Abyss and 2017’s Hiss Spun, the distorted guitars balanced with Wolfe’s rich falsetto.
“I definitely knew I wanted to have some rock moments on the record, and so when we were working on Swallower, it was just sort of leaning that way, because I had the verses which are a little bit more down-tempo, but I was like, ‘I think I want to write a little bit more of a rock chorus for this one,’” Wolfe shares.
She adds, “Jen came up with a melody for that, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can sing this high, honestly,’ but I gave it a try, and yeah, just had some fun playing with some really high notes that I don’t normally go to.
“With Turn the Key, that song lyrically is really about finding myself again, or finding a new version of myself, like just feeling like I had kind of lost myself and been self-abandoning for a really long time, so that song’s really about calling my power back, and I just felt like it lent itself to having heavy distorted guitars, and so I started there with that song.”
While some songs on The Dark find inspiration from experiences and themes that are bigger than you and I, album closer Dancer in the Sky delves into grief and looks to a film dear to Wolfe’s heart.
Inspired by the 1998 movie What Dreams May Come, a fantasy drama film led by Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, and Cuba Gooding Jr., Wolfe channelled themes of the afterlife she visited throughout the album and distilled them for the touching ballad.
“It began as a really sort of melancholic piano song that I had written, and I imagined that it would stay that way,” she explains.
“But when Jen heard it – her and I would really bounce off of each other really quickly in the studio – she just sort of took it and ran with it, and was like, ‘What if we make it a little bit more triumphant, and be inspired by people like Annie Lennox and Kate Bush, and make it a little bit more, orchestral, and different?’
“We were playing with a lot of vocal layers and things like that. So yeah, I was really inspired by this film that I’ve always loved called What Dreams May Come. Robin Williams stars in it, and it’s very much about the afterlife and the different levels and realms and literally having to reach into hell to pull someone out.
“I’ve always been so enamoured by the story of that movie. I wrote that song about that story and inspired by that movie that I’ve just loved for so long, and it’s also inspired by grief in general, and losing someone, and how you’re sort of looking for signs of them, whether it’s a cloud that looks like a woman dancing, or a butterfly, or something like that.
“Those little moments of nature mean so much to you when you’re going through grief, so the song is about that as well. I guess I felt like it made sense to close the album with this really big moment.”
What Dreams May Come isn’t Wolfe’s first foray into the film world. In 2022, she released a soundtrack album for the slasher film X, working with composer Tyler Bates and providing vocals for the score.
Wolfe has also drawn inspiration from television series, and a couple of her songs have soundtracked major moments.
Her song Feral Love, from 2013’s Pain Is Beauty, was the soundtrack to the trailer for Game of Thrones’ fourth season, while Carrion Flowers and Survive, from 2015’s Abyss, featured on the trailer for Fear The Walking Dead and during a key moment of the Australian series, Wentworth, in its fifth season.
But did you know that she initially wrote Survive to feature on The Walking Dead?
“Funnily enough, I was actually asked to write a song for The Walking Dead ages ago, and I wrote Survive, and then they didn’t use it,” Wolfe admits. “But it went on to be one of my most used songs in other TV shows and things, so I feel like that sort of interplay between visuals and songwriting is a really cool thing.”
She continues, “I just love doing that, honestly. I love working with a prompt. Even the song Seethe on this new record—I actually thought I was being asked to write a song for a TV show—I misread an email, and so I wrote that song.
“It was a song I was kind of working on anyway, but I wrote it thinking, ‘Oh, this could be the opening credits of a TV show or something,’ so I really enjoy that sort of like push and pull. And the [new] song Halo, I wrote after watching the first season of The Last of Us. I wrote that about the father-daughter style relationship in that show, so I’m definitely influenced a lot by film and TV and writing, yeah.”
Outside of music, film, and television, Wolfe has also collaborated with fragrances. In 2019, she teamed up with Lvnea Perfume, and earlier this year, was the face of Heretic Parfum’s gothic new scents.
The title track and Death is Not the End arrived a week after fan speculation swirled on social media, with Heretic Parfum revealing that they’d collaborated with Wolfe on a new collection of five spectral fragrances, the GHOSTS series, marking the first time the Los Angeles fragrance brand had partnered with a musician.
But Wolfe says most of the work was already done before she was asked if she’d want to represent the new perfume series.
“This collaboration was interesting because they had actually already finished the scents themselves and had the whole concept of GHOSTS prepared,” she shares, “And then they presented it to me like, ‘Is this something you’d be interested in collaborating with – being part of the visual campaign?’
“When they presented the concept of it being this sort of liminal thing between worlds, I just feel like it aligned so closely with what I was working on for this record, because it was pretty similar timing to when we were finishing up the record to when they asked me, and I had already been like working on this visual idea of the séance.”
Wolfe compliments the team at Heretic, describing them as “great” to work with and the visuals as “beautiful.”
“I’m so impressed with the scents, too, like I don’t even understand how you come up with these blends,” she quips. “They’re so strange but so alluring at the same time.”
How the perfumes ended up aligning so perfectly with The Dark remains a mystery. “The timing was really synchronistic, and yeah, I always wonder how it came across from the outside that there was a perfume and new music happening at the same time, but it literally just happened to be the timing of it wasn’t on purpose.”
Does Wolfe plan to bring fans’ senses release to life on tour for The Dark? Will she tour the album and bring a sense of GHOSTS to life in the visual and soundscape of her show?
“It’s always an interesting challenge to learn to play songs from a record live,” Wolfe shares. “My bandmates and I have been working since March, I think, to really get this setlist right, and infuse new life into the old songs, and yeah, learning these new songs.”
Right now, she’s focused on staying present and having fun with it – something that happened even in the recording of the album. She explains, “It’s a dark album, but I want to have fun, and I want to be playful, and I want whimsy, and magic amidst the dark, because I mean, that’s what The Dark is.
“It’s this love letter to gothic culture, and all these beautiful dark things, and art, and film, and music, so I hope I can bring that sort of sense of dark whimsy to the stage as well,” Wolfe adds. As for the visual aspect of the show, she and her bandmates are still working on it.
“I honestly really want to keep it simple,” she notes, echoing sentiments surrounding The Dark. “I feel like my personal style has gotten a little bit more minimal over the years, and I’m trying to bring that to the stage as well, and just literally using the super thin fabric that almost feels like a veil between worlds. I’m hoping we can bring it together in the right way.”
The Dark will be released on Friday, 21 August, via Loma Vista Recordings. The album is available to pre-order and pre-save.
