“I needed to go through some difficult times to stop self-abandoning”
Chelsea Wolfe has spoken to NME about the period of personal upheaval that inspired her incoming ninth album ‘The Dark’, which she announced today (Tuesday July 21). Read on for our full interview below.
The enigmatic Californian artist, who blends elements of folk, rock and doom metal with her haunting vocal delivery, has long been a respected figure within alternative music circles – having been previously remixed by Deftones side-project ††† (Crosses) and working with hardcore pioneers Converge. Launched with new single ‘Cold’, ‘The Dark’ follows 2024’s industrial-tinged ‘She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She’ – and works as a move towards a bone bare-bone, delicate, slow-burning alt-rock sound.
Produced alongside Jennifer Decilveo and longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm, Wolfe told NME that her creative union with the former – who has written with Hozier and Miley Cyrus, helped unlock the direction of the album. Heading down from home in Northern California for LA sessions with Decilveo in short bursts, the initial seeds of an album in 2024 gradually began to unravel into what would become ‘The Dark’.
“We wrote together really quickly and easily, and I feel like we have a lot in common, being women of the same age in the music industry,” she said. “Sometimes, people treat studio time like a hangout, but I’m not really that kind of person. For me, the hangout is the work, the creative session, so it was nice to be on the same page with her on that. How we were connecting and communicating was through the work itself.
“She helped me define where I wanted to go with the record, because at first, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted this record to sound like,” Wolfe continued. “But once Jen asked the question straight-up, ‘What do you want this record to be?’, it [became clearer]. ‘Let’s go back to instruments, start songs on acoustic guitar or piano and vocals and build from there.’”
Last month, Wolfe began teasing the album by simultaneously unveiling the spellbinding folk of the title track and ‘Death Is Not The End’, a song that jolts from bewitching, breathy vocals into her magnificent wails over a showering of ’90s alt-rock atmosphere. Check out the rest of our interview below, where Wolfe unpacked the album’s themes and revealed the high-profile guest who lent a hand to ‘Swallower’.
NME: Hi Chelsea. An acoustic-led sound is nothing totally new for you, but why did this more minimalistic approach come back around at this point in your career?
Chelsea Wolfe: “The producer I ended up working with on ‘She Reaches Out…’ [Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio], the direction he really wanted to go in was more electronic and trip-hop, and at that point in my life, I was like, ‘Why not? Let’s try something totally different’. But with this one, I really felt strongly about there being a lot of guitar in this record. I don’t necessarily see it as an acoustic album, because there are rock moments.”
You’re right, ‘Death Is Not The End’ undergoes a massive transformation, dynamically. Was there an overall atmosphere you were trying to conjure up on the record?
“Thematically, there’s a lot of this feeling of reaching through the veil of life into death, life into the afterlife, and exploring what that would sound like. The séance of letting something go or losing something and reaching for it one more time, whether that’s a literal death, a metaphorical ego death or a loss of a relationship. I wanted to portray that in these ups and downs, these liminal moments.
“‘Death Is Not The End’ is the perfect example, where it starts off really delicate and ghostly, you’re in this very quiet in-between realm, and then it opens up into something, into the afterlife, into whatever it means for you. A lot of my filmic references were in that way; What Dreams May Come, The Others, these subtly haunted-feeling films.”
Can you pinpoint any material examples or moments that helped you channel the sense of this in-between realm into the album?
“Another big theme of the album is letting go… being in my early 40s as a woman, growing older and wanting to be who I am now. I could see, as I was writing this, how much self-abandonment there had been in my life, how much I was prioritising the wants and needs of people around me or co-dependent relationships. I was putting a lot more energy into any of that than my own life or even my music, and I had this realisation that I was really self-abandoning.
“That was definitely a ‘dark night of the soul’ moment, which is where the album title really comes from, realising that I needed to go through some difficult times and conversations in order to stop self-abandoning. Some of that did include letting go of people in my life that I cared for – but I know that we’re not healthy for each other – and parts of myself that I didn’t identify with anymore. As we get older, we start to realise, ‘Is this really me, or is this what people have been projecting onto me for so many years, that I’ve taken it on as my own identity?’”
Is that process still ongoing?
“I don’t think there’s ever really a final destination when it comes to something like that. It’s an ongoing process, re-evaluating and taking a look at your own life every once in a while. I was really writing about my own experiences in real time, and Jen was also encouraging me [to channel] what I was actually going through, realising that I had to let go of something or someone, and facing that by writing a song about it.”
You’ve spoken about facing up to your old drinking habits on ‘She Reaches Out…’ and letting go of those parts of your former self. Did that process open the door for what you now confront on ‘The Dark’?
“Definitely. ‘She Reaches Out…’, most of it was written right after I got sober, and there’s this thing that a lot of people call the ‘pink cloud’ of that first year of sobriety, where everything feels very crystalline and beautiful because you’re really clear-headed for the first time – in a really long time. A lot of that album was written from that place, where there’s a fresh kind of confidence, owning my power, decisions and maybe naively feeling like I have it figured out.
“And then this record is that realisation after the ‘pink cloud’ phase, you’re really living the day-to-day of continuing to be sober and [realising], ‘I have to keep going.’ This record is a little bit more about the deeper work, the harrowing side of things and the second wave of work that I realised that I needed to do in my own life. That was really scary, because this wave involved stepping away from things and people that I actually loved, while the first wave was a little bit more like, ‘This has been tormenting me for so long, I feel really free letting go of this.’”
You ask “Who’s this that I’ve become now?” on ‘The Dark’. What stage of the process is that line trying to capture?
“It’s about growing older and having that realisation that you’re simultaneously changing… but it’s not a repetition of the past, it’s something totally new. It’s about trying to meet myself where I’m at now, and saying it’s a glimpse of what’s to come down the line. I am literally starting the second half of my life, and I’m trying to be open to that and embrace where I’m at now.”
The guitar solo on ‘Swallower’ has a massive Queens Of The Stone Age vibe…
“Yeah, that’s Troy [Van Leeuwen, guitarist]!”
You enlisted him for ‘16 Psyche’ back in 2017. What drew you back to him for this song?
“Nine years… I didn’t realise that, it’s crazy. When we had him on ‘16 Psyche’, I left a space for him to write a guitar solo and did the same thing with ‘Swallower’. It’s one of the more rock moments on the record, it had this bridge that we were figuring out, and I was like, ‘This is the perfect spot to give Troy another space to do his thing,’ and he totally killed it.”
There’s a lot of people connected to the record, from Nine Inch Nails associates Justin Medal-Johnsen and Robin Finck to Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. At this point in your career, what guides you towards working with other people?
“It’s a lot more intuitive and exploratory… when I was younger, there was a lot more feeling like I had to say yes to every single collaboration. As I’ve gotten older, that’s gotten a little bit more like, ‘Am I feeling connected to this song? Do I feel like I can add something to it, or is it me saying yes because I feel like I should?’”
You’ve spoken before about your music generally containing more questions than answers, yet you make an uplifting declaration in ‘The Dark’: “Our love glows in the darkness / In a world that feels so heartless / The light returns”. Is that a key takeaway from the record?
“I wrote a statement around the album to help myself define it, and said, ‘I believe good things come from darkness, rest, dreams, whimsy, imagination, starlight. It gives space for the light to arrive’. Obviously, this album is very much a love letter to the dark and the gothic heart of everything that I do as a musician. But on a song like this, I am expressing that the dark creates space for light to arrive, for seeds to grow and create something beautiful.”
‘The Dark’ is released on August 21 via Loma Vista. Pre-order it here.
Her upcoming tour dates are below, with Wolfe set to deliver the first live experience of new music at an intimate show at London’s The Dome ahead of headlining ArcTanGent. Visit here for tickets and more information.
AUGUST
18 – London, UK – The Dome
20 – Bristol, UK – ArcTanGent Festival
SEPTEMBER
16 – San Francisco, CA, Curran Theatre
18 – Seattle, WA, The Moore Theatre
19 – Salem, OR, Elsinore Theatre
20 – Portland, OR, Roseland Theater
22 – Salt Lake City, UT, The Union Event Center
24 – Denver, CO, Paramount Theatre
25 – Lawrence, KS, Liberty Hall
26 – St. Paul, MN, The Fitzgerald Theater
28 – Chicago, IL, The Riviera Theatre
29 – Columbus, OH, The Bluestone
30 – Detroit, MI, Masonic Jack White Theatre
OCTOBER
5 – Boston, MA, Boch Center Shubert Theatre
6 – New York, NY, The Town Hall
8 – Munhall, PA, Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall
9 – Glenside, PA, Keswick Theatre
10 – Washington, DC, Sixth & I
12 – Asheville, NC, The Orange Peel
13 – Atlanta, GA, Buckhead Theatre
14 – Nashville, TN, Marathon Music Works
16 – Dallas, TX, Texas Theatre
17 – Austin, TX, Emo’s
20 – Tucson, AZ, Rialto Theatre
21 – El Cajon, CA, The Magnolia
23 – Los Angeles, CA, The Orpheum Theatre
NOVEMBER
21 – Utrecht, NL, TivoliVredenburg
23 – Berlin, DE, Admiralspalast
24 – Hamburg, DE, Große Freiheit 36
25 – Copenhagen, DK, Vega
27 – Oslo, NO, Betong
28 – Stockholm, SE, Vasateatern
30 – Tallinn, EE, Helitehas
DECEMBER
2 – Vilnius, LT, LOFTAS
3 – Warsaw, PL – Progresja
5 – Prague, CZ, ARCHA+
6 – Vienna, AT, Budocenter
7 – Budapest, HU, Akvárium Klub
9 – Mannheim, DE, Capitol
11 – Fribourg, CH, Fri-Son
12 – Milan, IT, Live Club
13 – Munich, DE, Isarphilharmonie
15 – Antwerp, BE, Trix
16 – Paris, FR, Casino de Paris
19 – Athens, GR, FLOYD
