“With this record, I’m admitting that I’m never gonna have it figured out, and I’m okay with that”, says Chelsea Wolfe. Her new album The Dark is simultaneously a reconnection with herself and a step outside her comfort zone.
Words: Christina Wenig
One of the most exciting things about life is that it never stops teaching you lessons; it never ceases to transform you – no matter how much soul-searching, looking inwards, and reflecting you’ve done. It’s something that Chelsea Wolfe had to learn quite recently. “The past five or six years, I have been going through a lot of changes, kicked off by getting sober from alcohol. The last record, She Reaches Out…, was very much written from that place of newness and seeing things crystal clear for the first time – feeling like I had it figured out a bit naively, and then realizing: Oh no, I don't have my shit together at all”, she says, laughing. That’s where The Dark came in.
On her ninth album, Chelsea delves deeper into her beloved darkness, exploring death and endings, and reconciling with the fact that taking care of and showing up for yourself is an ongoing, never-ending process; that you can never know yourself completely because life keeps twisting and shifting your shape. In the album’s title track, Chelsea wonders: “Who’s this that I’ve become now?” Mirroring the recent revival of gloomy, gothic aesthetics and narratives in pop culture (as if she hasn’t been the personification of gothic gloom for 15 years), the musician sees her latest work as a love letter to the dark, rejecting many of the Eurocentric notions that connect death to the negative, morbid and macabre. “In Western culture, you’re not supposed to think or talk about death. I really admire people who become death doulas and learned recently about choirs who sing to people who are dying of terminal illnesses. I think that’s so insanely beautiful”, she shares her perspective on mortality. “The last two songs on the record specifically deal with the afterlife, the transition and space in between. I was doing some ancestral work honoring my matriarchal ancestors and attempting to connect with them through ritual. At the same time, I reconnected with my grandmother, who I hadn’t spoken to for over twenty years. Reconnecting with her as a woman in my forties has been so special and helped me to see things differently, through the eyes of an elder, and that infused a lot of energy into my music as well.”
Pouring back into yourself
She found another, unlikely companion for her explorations in Mono Lake, a unique saline body of water in the Californian mountains that ended up being the site of her shootings for the album cover and the video for Death Is Not The End. After excessive water diversions drained the lake (exposing its famous, otherworldly Tufa columns) and put it on the verge of ecological collapse in the late seventies, initiatives formed to get water flowing back and save its singular ecosystem. “Mono Lake felt like a good parallel for the choice that you have to make as you get older: Am I just gonna crumble and keep pouring all my energy into these bottomless pits that are making me feel completely drained, that turn my skin gray and make me feel like I’m dying, or am I gonna make some changes and try a different approach?”
The theme of letting go runs through every song on The Dark. It was mostly informed by learning to say no and disconnecting from these “bottomless pits” of relationships, as Chelsea says –“I need to know who I am without you”, as she sings in Cold. But it also led her to confront herself and leave her comfort zone. Her songs are usually draped in a mysterious haziness, reverb blurring the lines between dream and reality. But as soon as the first notes of album opener Cold ring out, you are hit with an unfamiliar clarity. Hearing fingers slide over guitar strings and hushed breaths, you can’t help but wonder whether this new production aesthetic mirrors the clarity and self-assurance the singer/songwriter found in real life.
“Having things a little bit clearer and more upfront, and hearing the vocals with almost no effects on them just lent itself to the type of songwriting”, she says. Because for the first time ever, she decided to work with a songwriting collaborator, namely Grammy Award winner Jenn Decilveo, who has spent the last decade working with pop powerhouses like Fletcher, Beth Ditto and Miley Cyrus. “For the first time, I really wanted to focus on traditional songwriting structure”, Chelsea explains this choice. Decilveo not only helped her zero in on these basics, but she also brought in traces of a pop sensibility Chelsea Wolfe used to shy away from. For example, writing actual choruses – “which I don’t always focus on”, she smirks. “In the past, if I wrote something that I felt was catchy, I was almost repelled by it and would almost not put a song on a record. Even Carrion Flowers, which is one of my favorite songs now, at the time felt so cringy or something.”
She reaches out … again
Between the piano-driven melancholia of Cold, the seductive rush of Seethe (featuring Queens Of The Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen), the shape-shifting etherealness of Death Is Not The End (featuring Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck), and the hymnic dark folk of the title track (featuring Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa), The Dark is Chelsea’s interpretation of an alternative rock album, containing entire universes. Nothing is ever one-dimensional and definite here: Every end makes way for a new beginning, and letting go opens opportunities to reach out again. “Died a thousand deaths, rise to live again, shapeshifting, she said, death is inescapable, and death is not the end”, she sings. We’re all haunted by ghosts – people, memories and past versions of ourselves that stay with us, while we lose touch with others. Chelsea Wolfe describes the album as a séance for her own soul, reconnecting with herself and bringing herself back from the dead. The music video for Cold explores this theme visually, pulling influences from movies like The Others (2001) and Repulsion (1965) – just two of the many cinematic album inspirations alongside What Dreams May Come (1998), Frankenstein (2025) and even Beetlejuice (1988).
Exploring the afterlife and the realm of ghosts also means facing your own legacy: the things you create now to leave behind, fragments of yourself to be found by future generations that define how you will be remembered – like an album. “The concept of legacy isn’t something I think about. Music is just an intrinsic part of who I am, and I’ve been lucky enough to build a career out of it”, Chelsea explains. “But I do think about artists that I love that have gone too soon, like Townes Van Zandt, and how much I connect with his music and videos I’ve seen of him performing or just talking with people. It’s so special that because he left these things behind, I can connect with him, and that someone can do that with me someday. A hundred years from now, maybe someone will find a song of mine that they like. That’s so cool and a little bit ghosty in a way – this old artifact becoming something present in someone’s life.”
