When Chelsea Wolfe was interviewed by the Guardian in 2015 about her fourth album, Abyss, she revealed that her music had been informed by the bouts of sleep paralysis she’d suffered from since childhood. The condition – a transitional state between being awake and asleep – affects sufferers in different ways. Some wake up feeling paralysed, others see ghosts or demonic figures.
For the California-born singer-songwriter, it meant “waking up, and you can move your body and your eyes are open, but there are figures and people from your dreams still present in your room”. No surprise, then, that her music – a blend of drone, alt, folk, industrial and doom metal – had ended up so spookily unsettling. She appeared on album covers with pupil-less eyes, spoke in interviews about “following the path of witchcraft” and even covered Norwegian black metal act and convicted arsonist/murderer Burzum.
She did have a sense of humour about it all, however, telling one interviewer, with a chuckle: “It’s not party music.” Since then, though, much has changed. Wolfe left Los Angeles for the mountains above the city – where she’s finally been able to enjoy a good night’s sleep. Sobriety since 2021 has also brought what she calls “a new clarity”.
Both developments inform The Dark. The sublime opener Cold is again driven by lack of sleep, but for entirely different reasons as she taps into the insomnia that can result from a fracturing relationship. With its strummed folk beginning, brushed drums and layers of piano and acoustic guitars, the yearning gothic ballad is closer to, say, Annie Lennox than Ethel Cain and sets the scene for this much more accessible ninth album which channels her darker urges into something more universal.
After 2024’s largely electronic, David Sitek-produced She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, Wolfe felt as if she was continually returning to “a version of my old self”. So The Dark turns to Grammy-winning producer/co-writer Jennifer Decilveo, whose credits include Hozier and Miley Cyrus, and returns to a core of guitar, bass and drums (alongside longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm). Drone and doom metal has almost entirely made way for brooding bass lines, wailing guitars, dramatic dynamic shifts and subtle orchestrations.
The dreamier, more gothic tracks recall Evanescence or, on Swallower, the Cure, while Wolfe’s haunting vocals literally span the spectrum from a whisper to a scream – or, on the driving, windswept Seethe, a blood-curdling howl. Her ethereal singing suggests, of all things, Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser fronting the Sisters of Mercy. Now 42, the singer has talked about how The Dark has been driven by “letting go … being in my early 40s as a woman, growing older and wanting to be who I am now”.
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