“Carrion Flowers” video
Chelsea Wolfe has released the stark black and white video for newest single, “Carrion Flowers,” directed by Wolfe herself and bandmate Ben Chisholm, with all editing by Chisholm. Shot in California and New York state, Wolfe shares,
“The visuals in the video allude to the drought in California and frustration about corporations being allowed to pump out all the water, destroying environments and communities, just to sell it back. While writing Abyss, I lived near where the water is piped into Los Angeles, but the lakes were dried up and the mountains were burned from fires. During filming we were exploring cracked lake beds and washed out roads – at one point I was laying in the middle of an abandoned canyon road with no chance of a car coming, and it was very surreal and quiet. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them there were vultures circling overhead like I was some exotic roadkill, so we filmed them too.
The scribbles and ropes in the video are about my own madness and self-doubt, and costume designer Jenni Hensler made me a human cocoon from this insane fabric – it represents a feeling of claustrophobia, like you just want to scratch your way out of it. And there is anger in this song; it’s got a sense of revenge for anyone who has suffered or died because of injustice.“
The track is also featured in the newly released official trailer for Dark Places, the upcoming film adapted from Gone Girl’s author Gillian Flynn, starring Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks, Chloe Grace Moretz and more. Watch here.
In anticipation of the August 7th release of her fifth album Abyss, Wolfe has released tracks “Iron Moon” and “Carrion Flowers” to great acclaim. NPR called “Carrion Flowers” as “dark and bottomless as a river at night … beautiful and terrifying,” while Rolling Stone called Abyss “her darkest and most personal album yet … a haunting, doomy exercise in loud-quiet dynamics.” The FADER loved “Iron Moon” for being “half-scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners psychedelic metal, half delicate folk ballad … completely transcendant,” and Pitchfork noted it as “the most metal-leaning Wolfe’s ever been, and it’s a welcome entrance.” Wolfe will take her tremendous live show on the road this summer and fall, kicking off at the end of August and making her way across North American through October. All dates are below.
Sleep paralysis plagues singer/songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, and that strange intersection of the conscious and the unconscious has inadvertently manifested itself within her work. Across the span of her first four albums, there is an underlying tension, a distorted and nebulous territory where dark shadows hover along the edges of the sublime and the graceful. But until now, Wolfe’s trials and tribulations with the boundaries between dreams and reality have only been a subconscious influence on her work. With her fifth album, Abyss, she deliberately confronts those boundaries and crafts a score to that realm she describes as the “hazy afterlife … an inverted thunderstorm … the dark backward … the abyss of time.”
Abyss arrives August 7th via Sargent House with pre-order links on iTunes and via the label, and fans can read the full statement behind the album here.
Chelsea Wolfe North American Tour
Aug 27 – Las Vegas, NV @ Backstage Bar +
Aug 28 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge +
Aug 29 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater #
Aug 31 – Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock Social Club #
Sep 1 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall #
Sep 2 – Cleveland Heights, OH @ Grog Shop #
Sep 3 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
Sep 4 – Montreal, QC @ Theater Fairmont
Sep 5 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair #
Sep 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg #
Sep 10 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts #
Sep 11 – Washington DC @ U Street Music Hall #
Sep 12 – Raleigh, NC @ Hopscotch Music Festival #
Sep 14 – Atlanta, GA @ Aisle 5 #
Sep 15 – Nashville, TN @ Mercy Lounge #
Sep 17 – New Orleans, LA @ One Eyed Jacks #
Sep 19 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk #
Sep 20 – Dallas, TX @ The Kessler #
Sep 22 – El Paso, TX @ Tricky Falls #
Sep 23 – Albuquerque, NM @ Launchpad #
Sep 24 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar #
Sep 25 – Los Angeles, CA @ Regent Theater #
Sep 26 – San Francisco, CA @ Grand Ballroom at Regency Center #
Sep 28 – Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theater #
Sep 29 – Seattle, WA @ Neumo’s *
Sep 30 – Vancouver, BC @ The Rickshaw *
Oct 2 – Bellingham, WA @ Shakedown
+ with Upsilon Acrux
# with Wovenhand
* with Mamiffer
Don’t miss Chelsea Wolfe on her North American tour – see all dates and purchase tickets HERE.