With a tonal darkness that borders on infernal, Chelsea Wolfe has been building and experimenting with nearly every genre of music since the age of nine. The California-born singer-songwriter’s music is now creeping into the mainstream with her 2013 release Pain Is Beauty, while holding tight to her underground following. Her track “Feral Love” was featured in HBO’s Game of Thrones, and she collaborated with director Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies,Arlington Road) for her longform music video-film Lone. Her newest album,Abyss, was recorded in Dallas with producer John Congleton (Swans, St. Vincent) and takes a quote by designer Yohji Yamamoto as its talisman: “Perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.”

As a former editor of Hustler magazine and author of Punk Elegies, a memoir about the birth of the ’70s LA punk movement, Allan MacDonell has a comprehensive outlook on the punk rock music scene. Here, MacDonell discusses Wolfe’s career, the theatrical elements of her music and her creative process.

Allan Macdonell: How, if at all, does Sacramento figure in your presentation?

Chelsea Wolfe: Living there gave me the time and the platform to experiment with music. I’d been writing and recording songs since I was a little kid living in the oldest part of a suburb outside of Sacramento. When I was around 20, I moved downtown, got a job and tried to play music. I was not very good for a long time. I would play two or three songs, get freaked out and run off stage. I was writing songs that were so autobiographical they made me feel physically sick, so I decided not to write about my personal life anymore and to write about things outside of myself. Then I left [Sacramento] for a while with a good friend and great performance artist Steve Vanoni. He taught me about life and art and gave me a chance to start playing music in front of new and accepting audiences. I followed a tour of performance art shows in Europe and would play at the end of the night. Then I came back home to Sacramento and recorded The Grime and The Glow; then moved to LA soon after.

AM: Both your parents are musicians, and your father in particular encouraged and influenced your musical self-education. Can you speak to the important part your parents played in your evolution as an artist?

CW: My dad is a musician; he was in a country band while I was growing up. My mom doesn’t play music but is a very artistic person and turned me on to some good music—Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. Both of them were supportive of me playing music. My dad passed down guitars, pedals and amps to me, and my mom always pushed me to keep trying. Unfortunately, for some reason there was a voice in my own head telling me I wasn’t good enough to do this and be up in front of people. So I tried going to different colleges and finding a new path, but in the background I was always playing music. The fact that I finally gave in and pursued playing music full time is really the result of family and friends and people encouraging me—pushing me to record and put my songs out in the world.

AM: What’s the most unsettling comparison someone has made regarding your music?

CW: I think it’s annoying for any artist when a journalist states that you’re influenced by an artist who you’ve never listened to or been into. Even if that artist is great, it’s still just weird.

AM: Are you a used-record shopper? If so, any favorite places to search?

CW: If we have a day off on tour and a city has a cool record store, my bandmates usually want to go there so I’ll go too. I’m never that drawn to record stores, but once I’m there, it’s kind of mesmerizing to wander through. I like the classical section at Amoeba.

AM: Virginia Woolf said: “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.” How important to is you making a living as an artist?

CW: I am making a living as an artist, and it’s pretty crazy to me still. I feel really lucky and very thankful. But I also live pretty simple. I live on the outskirts, in the mountains—in part to get away from all the noise, but it’s also much more affordable out there. I can have a house with a yard for the price of maybe one bedroom in some cities.

AM: Do you consciously produce theatrical elements in your work?

CW: I’ve had an affinity for the dramatic since I was a kid. I was always shy so I could barely manage something like speaking in front of the class, but grand musicals were playing in my head at all times. I don’t think that making my music dramatic is a conscious decision. I think it just happens.

AM: In your filmmaking collaborations, what are the challenges and rewards as an artist in melding visual themes to your music?

CW: It’s very challenging. I struggle with photo shoots even. I can only handle like an hour of it and then I’m a bit done. But with filming you’re doing a lot more hours and there’s a lot more people involved, so it really broke me down when I was filming Lone—this series of emotional, surreal music videos with director Mark Pellington. It broke me down to the point that I was intensely real and vulnerable on screen, and it was hard for me to watch that later, to be honest. But at the same time I think it helped me to sort of accept myself more.

AM: How do you overcome self-doubt?

CW: It’s hard for me to get onstage sometimes, but I have to just say “fuck it” and go.

AM: After working alone, what adjustments do you make to work collaboratively?

CW: I go back and forth between the two very often. At this point, this project has become very collaborative even though it started as a solo project. When I write alone, I try to just set my mind and emotions loose and write in a very instinctual way. Other times my bandmate and main collaborator Ben (Chisholm) will be working on a song, and I’ll latch onto a certain part and encourage him to expand on it, and the song sort of grows from there.

AM: Can you compare the emotional experience of recording to the emotional experience of playing live in front of an audience?

CW: By the time I get to the studio I’ve spent months or years writing, curating and refining the songs for whatever album I’m going in to work on. So once I’m there, I’m pretty utilitarian about things and want to work and move the songs forward. My favorite part—and the part that causes me the most turmoil—is mixing, piecing all the elements together at the very end. I’m pretty particular about little sounds and how things flow, and I can make myself crazy about it. But it’s all very insular—just this intense experience you have with building for a month or whatever—and then you come out of it with a finished piece. Playing live in front of people, you’ve got to pull yourself together in order to fall apart again. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but you have to know the songs really well in order to really lose yourself inside them. And you have to feel really strong and confident in order to go out on stage and become a broken, real person in front of people. At least that’s how it is for me.

AM: Have you been mentored in navigating the business aspects of your career? How does an artist learn that skill?

CW: I have a great manager. I never really understood what a real or good manager did before I met Cathy Pellow. Her goal has always been to help me grow as an artist and be a career artist so that, hopefully, I can still be releasing music and playing when I’m grey-haired. It’s not that she tries to sway me one way or another, but she’s always there to guide as we navigate a path that is always kind of morphing and surprising us.

AM: Do you ever hear a song and think, “Man, I’d like to have written that”?

CW: I think the Iceage song “Forever” is really beautiful. When I first heard it I definitely had a sense of how did they do that?

AM: Has being “unclassifiable” helped or hurt you in reaching your audience?

CW: I imagine that it has helped. We’ve been accepted in many different worlds. I feel grateful for it.

AM: Who among your contemporaries isn’t being heard as widely as they should be?

CW: Screature. They just released their second album, Four Columns. They’re hometown friends from Sacramento who blow me away with how multi-talented and rad they all are, and their band is really fucking good. I want more people to hear them because I think other people will enjoy them too.

AM: Is the range of music you listen to for pleasure as wide and varied as the range of styles you write and play?

CW: Even more. Most of the time I’ll put on Scientist records for hours, and that puts me in a trance. Then I’ll listen to Wardruna or maybe Aphex Twin depending on my mood. I make mixes on Spotify, kind of in themes—I have one that is Tricky, soundtrack music from Werner Herzog films, John Fahey, Colleen, Abner Jay. I find familiar things in all different styles of music.

AM: How big would your ideal audience be for a live performance?

CW: Ideally it’s great when the audience is full of people who like your music and just want to be there with you to experience it. Hopefully it’s in a theater or hall with some nice sound and old feelings and good energy. I’d say all that comes before audience size.

(via Issue Magazine)

Chelsea Wolfe has a cover feature and a stellar 9/10 review for her album Abyss in Music & Riots Issue 13. 

Check out the magazine online HERE or in the embedded player below. The feature begins on page 74, and the album review is on page 105.

L.A.-based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe just gifted the world with one heck of an album. Abyss, her fifth full length release, is a beautiful, intricate tangle of dark, dreamy folk-metal. We chat with Wolfe about growing up in her father’s studio, the dark influences behind her songwriting and how she learned to find her voice.

How long have you been writing songs?

Since I was around 9 years old. While I was growing up my father was in a country band and they’d record and practice at his home studio. I was mesmerized by the harmonies and the recording process. My dad taught me some basics and set me up with a Tascam 8-track and I recorded songs on that thing for years. I still have it.

Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?

Yes. I was listening to a lot of R&B at the time, and got really into Lauryn Hill, and my dad introduced me to bands like Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin, while my mom showed me artists like Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, so I think my first songs were a sort of blend of all those influences. I was writing really straightforward songs about things I knew nothing about, like love and relationships. I had a big imagination for simple subjects.

How did you get started?

I wrote poetry first and then decided to set words to music. Over the years I just kept writing and recording, but never imagined that I could actually be a musician or be up in front of people playing shows. Eventually, though, friends and family encouraged me enough to give it try. It was rough for many years – it took me a long time to feel comfortable and keep my head together onstage. That was in my early 20’s. Around the time of my first album release, The Grime and the Glow, that’s when I started taking things more seriously and focusing on music over anything else.

What’s your typical songwriting process like?

Typically I write alone and then bring demos to my co-producer Ben Chisholm or the rest of the band to work parts out together. Ben also writes songs for this project, and I also sort of curate songs from outside at times. For this album, “Iron Moon” was co-written by our friend Karlos Rene Ayala who wrote the song “Boyfriend,” which I covered on my acoustic album Unknown Rooms. I also do a cover of another friend, Jesse K. Phillips’, song “Arteries,” but gave it new lyrics, melody and title: “Color of Blood.”

Several of your songs were written about world events, like the suicide of a Foxconn worker last year. How often do real events (ones you haven’t experienced yourself) inspire your writing?

They’ve always been an influence on why I write. The first time I wrote a poem when I was a kid was when I realized how things connect – sounds, situations, people. The realities of the world immediately surrounding me juxtaposed with the realities of the world as a whole; this macro vs. micro perspective has always haunted me, even in my dreams.

How much do aesthetics play into your songwriting?

I write in an instinctual way, letting the ideas come as they come. Image and aesthetic don’t have much to do with songwriting for me. It’s what comes after. While I’m writing it is very visual for me, but it’s behind closed eyes. I wrote most of the songs for Abyss in a big empty barn at my manager’s property out in the high desert, and the rest in my little studio at home, surrounded by colorful Steve Vanoni paintings, but I almost always had my eyes closed no matter where I was. It’s the feeling of a space or a moment I’m trying to capture, not the look of it.

Which of your songs – on any album – was the most difficult for you to write?

“They’ll Clap When You’re Gone” was a really personal and emotional song. The end part is a bit separated from me – I was alluding to sparkling people, musicians, actors who die young and sort of live on forever because of it, but the verses had some lines that cut really deep. I almost didn’t put the song on the album because it was so dark and personal, but I also felt like it was important to keep being brutally honest. “The Waves Have Come” was equally as brutal. I was watching footage from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, including home videos from people who lost their loved ones and homes and I wrote the song based off of that. I sometimes come out of songwriting sessions physically shaking or with my heart beating almost out of my chest.

Which of your songs do your fans react to the most?

I often hear requests at shows for “Halfsleeper,” one of my older songs.

Who are your favorite songwriters?

Abner Jay, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams.

What bands or artists are you listening to at the moment that we should check out?

Lately I’ve been listening to Screature, John Fahey, Aphex Twin, Wardruna, Scientist, Fetty Wap, Röyksopp & Robyn, Sumac, Russian Circles, True Widow, Flying Lotus, Brody Dalle, Wovenhand, and the Scott Walker + Sunn O))) record Soused.

What is the most perfect song ever written?

“Vietnam” by Abner Jay.

Chelsea Wolfe’s newest album is officially out today, available on all digital and streaming platforms. Pick up a physical copy in stores now, or order online on our stores – US $ which ships worldwide or UK £ which ships to EU.

Chelsea Wolfe’s has US and EU tours in support of this new album – see all dates and buy tickets HERE. 

See what people are saying about the album below.

“Wolfe has found a way to remain backed by candelabra and decked in minimalist corpse paint and still locate pop melody alongside the bombast. The sultry ballad “Simple Death” is dark, but it’s also gorgeous and catchy: Wolfe is not simply going heavier for heavier’s sake, she’s mastering her craft, writing songs that you remember immediately, and that you’ll find yourself humming now and then. The bigger sound is what the source material, her sleep/dream issues, needed. Which brings to mind that line about letting your hair grow as you get old, of not changing your course. We’re all frail and imperfect, and that’s fine. But instead of inventing a persona or finding an easier way, Wolfe went deep into herself, doubled down on the horrors of life, and came back with a bleak, beautiful masterpiece—she kept going, especially when it started to hurt.” – Pitchfork

“Chelsea Wolfe’s sound may not be “heavy” in the traditional sense, but there’s something so abrasive about the arrangements on Abyss that detuned guitars aren’t required to deliver crushing music. Songs like “Iron Moon” mingle sludgy instrumentation and cacophonous noise with Wolfe’s cathartic caterwaul, while the electronic-tinged “Grey Days” adopts a tone as haunting as it is seductive. But no matter how aggressive the instrumentation, the music always manages to push things forward, as showcased by the avant-orchestral finale, ‘The Abyss.’” – Revolver

“There’s a vast landscape in Abyss, but most times it’s too dark to be certain of what you see. That wavering imagery, an intentional creative choice, gives the album room to swell with personalized monsters. The tormented piano melody of “The Abyss” pierces the delicate wind blowing in the background, setting up the score for any scarring horror film of the future, complete with nervous fiddling on the violin. Now more than ever, Wolfe’s deathly gloom matches her music succinctly. Abyss terrifies from start to finish, the haunting work of a twisted genius in her prime.” – Consequence of Sound

“Heartbreak and darkness are the threads that run through Wolfe’s diverse-yet-distinctive discography. They’re never far behind her. If anything, Abyss chases them, with a tenderness that understands the beauty to be captured therein.” – NPR Music

“Her best work yet, by far, which is saying something already…In the end, it’s what stays with you of Abyss that really matters, it’s the images you take from this plunge that define the lasting power of this music…something from Abyss will stay with you, something from it will change you. And that is a feat that not many albums can claim.” – Terrorizer, Album of the Month Review

“Some albums introduce themselves, and the sonic world they inhabit, gradually, unfolding like the opening of a play or film, offering sweeping views of what to expect over the next hour. Other records take a more direct approach, dropping listeners right into a world of exciting, tantalising riffs and melodies. And then there are records like Abyss, where listeners aren’t so much dropped into a sonic world as bludgeoned within an inch of their life and left reeling for the next 56 minutes. It’s a stunning, thrilling record and one that becomes more and more rewarding with each subsequent listen.” – The 405

“Density, weight and punishing intensity threaten to entirely submerge Chelsea Wolfe’s fourth album in a cloak of gothic camouflage. But peer behind the veneer and what do you encounter? Rather than the banshee figure one might expect, Abyss portrays a skilled songwriter at the peak of her game, capable of composing wonderfully harmonious, country-tinged laments – albeit drowning them in outlandish studio trickery and effects.” – The Skinny

“The music of Chelsea Wolfe is a lush cacophony of drones, dirges, and dark beauty that has proven to be quite transcending with recent TV spots in hits shows such as The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. The heady mixture of shoegaze, industrial, and doom metal combined with Chelsea’s fragile but commanding vocals creates a uniform wall of sound all it’s own. Abyss, the singer-songwriter’s fifth album and third overall for Sargent House records, is a funeralesque tour-de-force of raw emotion that impressively melds a pop charm into each aching track.” – Soundblab

“The depth of the arrangements sets Abyss even farther apart from—and ahead of—Wolfe’s past recordings. The beat-laden highlights of Pain Is Beauty provided a more stripped down precursor, but Wolfe gets even more comfortable with noise and volume, juxtaposing her gently melancholy vocals against a claustrophobic atmosphere of grind and pulse.” – Treble Zine

“What makes Abyss so wonderfully gloomy/gloomily wonderful is Chelsea’s mastery of conveying emotional states that our nightmares can conjure. Anxiety, despair, and pining are all laced within the subconscious mind; and Wolfe has brought these feelings to light and made us feel the most vulnerable. That deep emotional affliction that is conveyed in Abyss is what makes the album such an exceptional piece of music. It is not very often an album can make a listener comfortable with susceptibility to their own emotions.” – The Amalgam

“Wolfe’s greatest weapon is her voice, which is ethereal and haunting, yet has the power to stand out against the unearthly sounds that fill the album. Wolfe employs a pallette of strings, synthesizers, deeply distorted guitars, and a menacing bass sound that hits you in the guts. Many of the tracks on the album hew to a similar pattern: a simple, stark verse, where Wolfe’s voice stands almost alone, followed by an explosion of a chorus. It’s a simple formula, but it works perfectly here. And the reason is that Wolfe has a complete mastery of the sound she is trying to achieve. Nothing is out of place. Nothing is accidental. Each sound is calculated to produce a desired effect. That may sound stifling, but it isn’t. This is a living, breathing album that moves with the stark menace of a perfect predator.” – Reverb Press

“The visceral personal details and graphic authenticity of the singer-songwriter are characteristics which Wolfe has been adopting more and more into her art as of late.Abyss marks an emotional lull in her career, acting as the tumultuous aftermath of Pain Is Beauty, channelling the viciousness of her early output, but feeling especially singular. As the odd-one-out in her catalogue, Abyss is Wolfe’s most emotionally direct, with unequivocal mourns for lost lovers summoning the titular abyss and beckoning its maw with each overcast delivery. Until finally, you are swallowed, and subjected to the nightmare Wolfe describes in “Simple Death”, where you are screaming, but you can’t wake up.” – Drunken Werewolf

“…feeling haunted is the ultimate feeling that Abyss delivers, whether it be through samples of people screaming, violin trills or some awesome doom metal riffs. It’s a twisted piece of work that will leave you feeling a sense of desolation and fear much greater than many heavier bands that Chelsea Wolfe takes inspiration from, and though it may concern dreams, once you hear this album, falling asleep is the last thing you’ll be able to do.” – Subba Cultcha

Chelsea Wolfe has trouble sleeping. Her issue, specifically, is sleep paralysis, a medical condition in which one wakes up and is unable to move, feels pinned down by a large weight, or has vivid impressions of another presence in the room. Doctors insist the experience isn’t necessarily indicative of any dangerous condition; it’s a result of the transitional state between REM sleep and other sleep stages becoming interrupted, causing the mind to be awake before the body. Thus the feeling of paralysis and, often, hallucinations.

For Wolfe, these hallucinations manifest as a shadowy figure in her room moving toward her. “During really intense times that it’s happened in the past, I’ve lashed out at nothing or grabbed my knife thinking someone was really there,” she says.

Wolfe’s sleep paralysis doesn’t involve the sensation of being unable to move, but rather the feeling of an immense pressure weighing down on her chest alongside the hallucinations. The sensation, she explains, was something she didn’t even know was unusual until she started talking about it with others. “I was at dinner with my dad, and he was talking about thinking there was someone in his room once during a dream, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happens to me almost every day,’” says Wolfe. “Everyone stopped talking and just looked at me, very concerned.”

Those feelings of pressure, dread, and suffocation are what Wolfe drew upon as inspiration for her latest album, Abyss, which stands out as the neo-folk artist’s heaviest work to date. Wolfe’s discography has always been filled with songs that recall half-forgotten dreams, and Abyss furthers that notion of exploring the space between dreams and reality, often in a way that feels immense and overwhelming, at times approaching doom metal. “We weren’t going for a metal sound or really any genre in particular, but we wanted it to be heavy,” says Wolfe.

While that heaviness includes high levels of distortion throughout the record, Wolfe explains that for her, the word heavy means many different things, ranging from guitar tones to finding human sounds out of programmed beats to adding layers of viola from collaborator Ezra Buchla — all of which contributed to a sense of frenzy on many of Abyss’ songs. “The way Ezra plays is kind of the way I imagine my soul would sound,” Wolfe says.

Wolfe chose to leave Los Angeles and record the album in Dallas with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans, Antony and the Johnsons). Wolfe “jumped at the chance” to record outside Los Angeles; she lives an hour outside the city now and used the change in setting as an inspiration to write new songs. The framework for Abyss’ title track was written on a rundown piano in the chapel of an old limestone building on the property of Josh T. Pearson in the “middle of nowhere, Texas,” a place Wolfe describes as “magical.”

For Abyss, Wolfe wanted to write songs that would lend themselves to a live setting. “We’ve played with such great live bands over the past couple of years, and they looked like they were having fun up there,” she says. “I wanted that, too, so I made sure the album had some songs that would be fun to play live.”

The focus on the live renditions doesn’t take way from any of the darkness or grandeur that pervades the album. For inspiration, Wolfe drew from the work of psychiatrist Carl Jung, specifically Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a partial autobiography Jung wrote shortly before his death. The book focused on recollections of his life, as well as the vivid dreams he would have about friends he hadn’t seen in years, only to find out that they had either just died or would die a few days later.

One dream in particular that Wolfe had about a strange experience in a cave served as a catalyst for the album. For Wolfe, it represented a deep, metaphorical drop into the subconscious. Her focus was on “confronting things that live in the dark places in the mind; confronting things that live in the darkest places on Earth, and beyond that, acknowledging the universe as a wild and endless abyss that we’re all just haphazardly a part of and trying to figure out.”

Photo by Johanna Torell

While the album is heavily influenced by her sleep problems and research into dreams, it’s not autobiographical. None of her albums are. A few years before her 2010 debut, The Grime and the Glow, Wolfe wrote a record about the breakup of three different relationships (“two guys, one girl”) that she scrapped because “it was sickeningly personal.” Since then, Wolfe explains her conscious effort to write songs about the ideas she would write poetry about, “the fucked up things in the world that nobody wants to talk about, the beautiful things that happen at the same time as those fucked up things, and the contrast between them.”

One example on Abyss is “Iron Moon”, a song about the true story of a 24-year-old Chinese poet and Foxconn worker named Xu Lizhi who committed suicide last year. From 2011 to 2014, Lizhi wrote poetry about the harsh conditions of working in a factory in Shenzen. After failed attempts to make a living by returning to his hometown and finding a career in the arts, he ended his life. For Wolfe, one poem of Lizhi’s, “I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron”, stood out. It’s a striking piece that contains lines like:

Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more

This kind of imagery, which Wolfe describes as “heavy, heartbreaking, and gorgeous,” served as a template for her approach to Abyss. While she drew on her own experiences for the album, even its most personal song, the wistful and desolate “Maw”, was influenced by a 1998 Robin Williams film Wolfe watched after his death last year. In the film, What Dreams May Come, Williams’ character undergoes a trial to find his wife in the afterlife, only to find that she doesn’t recognize him because she’s trapped in a sort of “mind-hell.” The term “maw” came to Wolfe after that and served as the backbone for the song. “It’s so visceral,” Wolfe says. “I fall in love with words like that — words that instantly bring to mind several different images. Like ‘abyss.’ It’s a perfect word.”

Wolfe’s journey into the abyss may be a personal one, but on her album, she invites the listener to take the plunge with her. Her sleep paralysis doesn’t happen as often now that she’s moved to the mountains and removed stressors from her life. Abyss acts as a catharsis, as well as a resolve to take back control in situations where it has been lost. With regard to her sleep troubles, Wolfe says, “Over time, I just taught myself to take a few seconds to breathe and fully wake up.” In finding that calm in the abyss, Wolfe is finally able to keep the terror at bay.

Chelsea Wolfe European Tour
Oct 30 – Cologne, DE @ Yuca Club
Oct 31 – Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique  w/ Low
Nov 02 – Hamburg, DE @ Knust **
Nov 03 – Gothenburg, SE @ Pustervik **
Nov 04 – Oslo, NO @ Blä **
Nov 05 – Stockholm, SE @ Slakthuset **
Nov 06 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen **
Nov 07 – Hannover, DE @ Café Glocksee **
Nov 08 – Leipzig, DE @ UT Connewitz **
Nov 10 – Warsaw, PL @ Proxima **
Nov 11 – Poznan, PL @ Blue Note **
Nov 12 – Berlin, DE @ Lido **
Nov 13 – Prague, CZ @ Dobeska **
Nov 14 – Budapest, HU @ A38 also w/ A Place To Bury Strangers **
Nov 15 – Vienna, AT @ Arena **
Nov 17 – Yverdon-Les-Bains, CH @ L’Amalgame **
Nov 18 – Paris, FR @ La Maroquinerie **
Nov 19 – Metz, FR @ Les Trinitaires **
Nov 21 – Kortrijk, BE @ Sonic City Festival
Nov 22 – London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall **
Nov 24 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
Nov 25 – Dublin, IRE @ Button Factory
Nov 27 – Prestatyn, UK @ ATP: Nightmare Before Christmas
Nov 29 – Bristol, UK @ The Fleece

** w/ A Dead Forest Index

“Heartbreak and darkness are the threads that run through Wolfe’s diverse-yet-distinctive discography. They’re never far behind her. If anything, Abyss chases them, with a tenderness that understands the beauty to be captured therein.”
See full write-up at NPR First Listen

Singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and I are sitting out on the back patio of Black Boar bar in Los Angeles drinking vodka and talking about pitch shifter pedals. However, we are being interrupted by an ex-touring musician-turned-bottomless-cage-dancer-turned-shrimp-boat-fisherman.

Wolfe and I politely listen while bottomless-shrimp-interrupter-guy explains to both of us exactly how a pitch shifter works, even though we both know: a pitch shifter shifts pitch. It allows the musician to program and play multiple harmonies at the same time. It’s a really atmospheric toy, one that Wolfe has been using lately. We engage bottomless-shrimp-interrupter for a bit, then direct our conversation back to her fifth studio album Abyss (Sargent House), a masterpiece of angelic, darkly compelling songs that grow far past Wolfe’s prior material.

“You should put that in the story,” Wolfe laughs as the guy walks back inside the bar. It’s too typical: male musician hears two female musicians talking about making music and feels he has to insert himself into the conversation. It’s annoying, but it’s harmlessly funny. It’s just part of being a woman in music: some man always thinks he knows better.

Not many people know how to make a Chelsea Wolfe record better she does, but for Abyss she enlisted world-renowned producer John Congleton (Swans, St. Vincent) in full trust that he did know better. Wolfe and her band met Congleton on tour, months prior to the album, and she knew she liked him right away, but she could tell their personalities would “butt heads a bit.” However, his past work spoke volumes and conflict in the studio is almost never a bad thing. It will ebb and flow, and make a better record.

“He is a great producer so I kind of had to let go a little bit,” she explains. “My approach to the album was very warm and hazy, and [Congleton’s] was more cold. It’s probably one of the reasons [Abyss] sounds so different from the others. Sonically, he does such a good job of making sure everything has a place. I’ll mix songs into mush.”

Abyss (which drops August 7th) plays on the mantra of designer Yohji Yamamoto: “Perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.” The album weaves in and out like a trance: a crafted swirl of guitars, drums, viola and synths. Songs like “Iron Moon” pull you in from the first hit, while “Crazy Love” and “After the Fall” ring out like demonic, unpredictable lullabies. Abyss is a showcase of tension and texture with Wolfe’s voice leading the way. Wolfe and her long time co-producer Ben Chisholm used it as a mirror to express the terror of the sleep paralysis she has been plagued with most of her adult life.

“I wake up, I open my eyes and figures that were in my dream are still there,” she tells me softly. (Everything about Wolfe is quiet yet unassumingly strong.) “When it first started happening I would scream, thrash because I thought there was a real person there in my room, moving towards me.” She never opened up about it to anyone, but soon told her father (a country musician himself with a home studio) and realized this wasn’t normal. “I just assumed it happened to everyone.”

Wolfe began her career almost a decade ago in her hometown of Sacramento, California. A shy kid who always felt as though she was “100 years old” at heart, Wolfe started writing songs at age nine on a simple 8-track, drawn to the pianos and guitars that were always around.

“From then on I was always writing and recording but oddly never imagined that it was something I could do for my career; for my life. I even avoided it for some reason, suppressing the part of myself that desired music and tried to go in a million different other directions,” she says. Then, in her early 20s, she met folk artist Steve Vanoni who ran an art compound called HorseCow, where Vanoni invited Wolfe to come on tour with him and helped guide her into her own musician. She returned home inspired and recorded her debut album The Grime and the Glow on her father’s 8-track. She soon started playing live, but stood out like a sore thumb in the hyper-technical math rock scene of the early 2000s.

“Everyone was doing all these things that seemed so crazy and I was just strumming and singing these emotionally raw songs. I felt like I was unequipped to be doing music,” she admits. But this alienation from a technical genre set her apart. She played with a veil for the first few years, unable to show her face due to her extreme stage fright. In 2010 she released her debut album, followed by Apokalypsis (2011) which was praised by international music media, gaining her an underground following. She signed with Sargent House alongside bands like Deafheaven, Wovenhand, Earth, and the next two albums saw her touring with Queen of the Stone Age, collaborating with designers and filmmakers (she and Mark Pellington recently released a long-form film, Lone), pushing her to a more mainstream stardom. Her single “Feral Love” was featured in Game of Thrones.

All the while, the fashion world was taking note of Wolfe’s unique style, draped fabrics, structured capes and custom-made horse-hair arm bracelets so long they drag on the ground. “Dressing up [for stage] is like armor, or a ritual for me to prepare to play the show,” Wolfe says. She and her stylist Jenni Hensler have been working together for years. “[Hesler] taught me to take risks in [fashion] and introduced me to designers who made the kinds of clothes I felt aligned with.”

Wolfe’s appeal in both her aesthetic and her music has always been mystery. Unlike many other artists today, she is very private about her personal gossip, only expressing deeply through her music instead of in interviews and social media. She is carefully reserved, which she says, was due to a few bad experiences at the beginning of her career.

“I make emotional music that some people connect with on a deep level and I’m sharing a really intimate side by being a singer and songwriter, so I feel strongly that I have to keep that separate from my home life and personal relationships, to keep them protected from each other,” she explains.

“I just want to make honest music, an honest living.”

(via i-D)

Noisey caught up with Chelsea Wolfe at Roskilde Festival – check out the video interview above.