Chelsea Wolfe has made a trip hop album and we stan our goth liege
She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She and why this musician means a lot to me
‘The only way is through. Look for the guiding lights; pay attention to the nudges of resonance and connection that are leading you on your way. Don’t give up.’
I receive this message from Chelsea Wolfe’s oracle card website. It’s a virtual deck with each card representing a song on her most recent album, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She.
This is a quasi review of that album, so draw a card yourself and listen to one of her songs. It’ll be a nice way to sample the music I’m writing about. If you don’t usually pull cards, I’ll encourage you not to think about this process as a ‘gotcha’, predicting your life or the future. Just read the card and react to it. Much of their meaning comes from the connections your brain makes.
I’ve been sitting with Chelsea Wolfe’s new album since it came out in February 2024, wondering what I think about it. Primarily wondering if me, a long-term Chelsea Wolfe fan, didn’t like the album because it was a departure from her doom metal and goth-folk roots.
But the oracle card message brought tears to my eyes in my favourite way – the overwhelm of emotions you can experience when looking at art and drinking coffee. Like the jolt of adrenaline misdirects to your visual cortex and your body experiences your quickening heartbeat as love rather than anxiety. It made me tear-up because I feel like I’m in a montage scene currently, in between big events in my life but I don’t know what the next event will be.
So I feel settled – Chelsea Wolfe has made a trip hop album and I’m pleased to be listening to it.
These are some things I say about Chelsea Wolfe (she/they):
I am not into stan culture but I am a stan. If Chelsea releases a roll-on perfume, I will buy it even though I am allergic to essential oils on my skin. If Chelsea is on the cover of a magazine, I will buy the issue.
Chelsea Wolfe is a musician who lives in the forest in northern California. If this sounds witchy, it is because she is a witch.
They are a glamorous goth, but not lace and graveyards way, in a Japanese linen and rock n roll way.
I found her music when it was used for the soundtrack of a trailer for Game of Thrones, Season 4.
When I left my old job in 2021, my bosses bought me tickets to a Chelsea Wolfe show.
Chelsea Wolfe has been a mainstay of the goth music scene for probably 20 years. She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She is their seventh studio album released under their name. While she’s perhaps best known for her metal-adjacent music, she’s also created acoustic and folk-inspired music throughout her career. Pale on Pale is an excellent example of this. Her most-streamed song on Spotify is Flatlands. It’s a beautiful song about the simple things in life being the most important. I think you should listen to it:
I started listening to Chelsea Wolfe with their 2013 album Pain is Beauty. I would smoke weak joints mixed with kitchen herbs and listen alone in my cold sharehouse bedroom. Feral Love was the song I encountered on the fateful Game of Thrones trailer. Chelsea was living in Los Angeles when they wrote it, and the beat is the sound of helicopters because this was the soundtrack of the city. Here’s the song:
In the middle of the last decade, Chelsea Wolfe released two dark, doom-metal inspired albums Abyss (2016) and Hiss Spun (2017). When I think about her trajectory, these seem integral to her oeuvre, even though she probably considers them her teenage albums in the context of her discography. Chelsea said they were inspired by moving back in with her parents as an adult, and feeling the regression to teenage angst.
Abyss is also informed by sleep paralysis. I am a fellow enjoyer of this terrifying phenomenon. To paraphrase Chelsea in a recent Associated Press interview: It’s not spiritual but the idea that sometimes a skeleton stands over your bed while you sleep opens your mind to other realms. Legends of the sleep demon lover, the succubus, may have been inspired by sleep paralysis. The track Dragged Out captures, for me, the sound of coming out of sleep paralysis – a ringing in my ears while the world moves in slow motion. Many Abyss tracks have explicitly gothic references, including Carrion Flowers, the lead track. The title makes me think of roadkill. Death and beauty, but ‘death’ is the natural state of decay and ‘beauty’ is the flower, a gem of the natural world, the reproductive system.
The 2017 album Hiss Spun is perhaps the Chelsea Wolfe album. They were obviously listening to a lot of metal and noise music in their childhood bedroom. This album ranges from proper screaming (Vex) to tracks that are simply distortion (Strain). I would talk about this album with my goth manager at work, and Ethel Cain has lyrics from 16 Psyche tattooed on her hands and wrote her song Ptolemaea to sound like a Chelsea Wolfe song from this time, which is enough evidence for me that it is culturally important. Hiss Spun is the album still mentioned by reply guys, “She was built different, for sure. You can tell she speaks straight from her heart. Hiss Spun is one of the best records I’ve ever heard.” —Robodude67, YouTube
This video clip is very ’90s dark with its references to asylums and pale skin/dark eyes but I will look past it. It comes with the territory.
Chelsea’s sixth album, Birth of Violence (2019) is more stripped back – with lyrics inspired by The Tarot and Southern Gothic. Consisting of mainly acoustic songs, it is a complete package, tied together nicely.
I started to graduate from fan to stan while listening to this album. I paid attention to lyrics. I purchased three items of merchandise. I related to Chelsea with a weird sense of mentorship, not in a parasocial way because I expect nothing in return, but in an inspirational way. Listening to Chelsea talk about themselves in interviews it felt like, for the first time, I had some sense of what my thirties could look like. (Chelsea is maybe ten years older than me.) I didn’t have many older friends at this time; I had no model for personhood for the next decade of my life. In the cycle of maiden, mother, crone, I was leaving the maiden era of youth at 28 but not a mother. I had no idea what I wanted for the future except maybe in my career. I found it anchoring to hear about the self possession, self power, that Chelsea found in their thirties. They talked a lot about meditation and pulling tarot cards, and the positive influence of witchcraft. I’m not going to talk much about the music of this album but here’s a song from it:
In the past few years Chelsea has worked on many other projects including Mrs Piss, a side project with her drummer Jess Gowrie and the album Bloodmoon with the metal band Converge.
Knowing this all, I did not expect Chelsea Wolfe to make a trip hop-inspired album but here we are. Here’s the link on YouTube if you’re keen to listen while reading the next bit. I hope you also get a targeted ad in which Vodka Cruiser Cola invites you to “hex your ex”. (A harbinger of doom for witchy shit in popular culture. Relief.)
She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She does not sound like guitars were its founding document. The music is textural and layered, sample after sample on top of each other to create sound. It is surprisingly warm.
Speaking on Yasi Salek’s interview podcast, 24 Question Party People, Chelsea describes starting out with rock songs, to which the album’s producer, Dave Sitek, brought trip hop references – that ’80s/90s UK music movement loosely defined by hip hop production used to make electronic, psychedelic, slow tempo music, often with submerged or treated vocals that sound haunting or eerie; there’s also a sense of the poverty and disillusionment of late 20th-century urban Britain. I like to listen to a lot of trip hop. I like to put on Angel by Massive Attack in lounge rooms at small parties and people tell me it’s gone a little spooky. The only Facebook status I’m not deeply ashamed of is when I posted Tricky’s Aftermath to my wall in 2011, no context provided. It would be amiss not to mention Portishead here as well; they for sure influenced the sounds of this album.
Trip hop is spooky and sexy. And I’d say much of Chelsea Wolfe’s music could be interpreted as spooky and sexy, so I understand why Sitek brought this to the table. Chelsea played a lot of trip hop on her radio show The Hypnos Hour. It’s definitely an influence on her, if not her music.
I’d say these influences work really well on track 5 of She Reaches Out to She, The Liminal. The beat is a heartbeat; the singing is slurred and whisper-like. The lyrics bring to mind insects or a break up. After listening to the album a normal amount of times – once or twice – it was the lyrics from The Liminal that got stuck in my head.
All you left behind, was your exoskeleton
[This video has flashing lights]
It’s maybe about a situationship (All you ever wanted was the liminal) but the witches love the liminal: the space between, the unknown. Not the conscious or subconscious but a third, secret thing (access to the divine). Substack’s spellchecker doesn’t recognise the word ‘liminal’, which is, um, discrimination against witches.
Track 3, Everything Turns Blue also reaches for trip hop references in its electronic beat with mushy vocals over the top. It has a dance-track formulation with crescendos and drops, which I initially described as “that thing they do when they take the bass out and then put it back in.” I am on a music writing learning curve. I like the portion of the song (2:45– 3:20) where everything stops except a swirling sound of harpies’ calls. This song gives me chills. The lyrics are about what you must do to get through hard times. To smoke, to dance, to fly. To breathe into the night. It falls and everything turns blue.
Or:
I’ve been thinking about you, heavy in my mind
I've been losing days here, do you know what that’s like?
I’ve been thinking about you, you fucked me up in my dreams
What do I have to do to heal you out of me?
Hot. We love to work on ourselves and expel negative energies from our dreams.
Perhaps I was most surprised by the trip hop energy on She Reaches Out to She because the first song released sounded like exploration of noise. The last track, Dusk, begins with 20 seconds of melodic noise fuzz. It’s a recording of Ben Chisholm, Chelsea’s keyboardist and frequent collaborator, improvising in the studio. The sound is eerie and implacable.
But when Dusk goes metal it goes more into glam rather than doom, with running, honking guitar. But maybe that’s what the song needed? Maybe it’s really fun to play? I would prefer it without the solo but maybe I’m a hater.
For the rest of the album, House of Self Undoing is surely inspired by drum and bass with a repeating drum pattern and a wobbly synth emerging between drops. Eyes Like Nightshade, Unseen World and Place in the Sun are jarring to me because the tracks are choppy and staccato, and seem a bit disconnected from the vocals. Place in the Sun has some trance elements.
I can’t help but wonder if these songs are overproduced. It’s like Sitek(?) couldn’t help himself from adding more flourishes, more layers, a little unknowable sound at the end of a line. But as much as I think the production is sometimes too much, the relationship between artist and producer is very much a collaboration. This is not a Taylor’s Version moment.
And this said, the layering technique works really well on Salt. The vocals bend around the electronic track but they work together. The repetition puts you into an altered state. It has the feeling of inertia of trip hop – as if the music was moving through space, the uplift is slow and it hovers a second before coming back down.
Place in the Sun is a piano ballad at its core. The oracle card for this song is Home, which makes me think it probably started out as a different kind of production. I’d love to hear an acoustic cover of this one day. Simply for fun, here’s a link to their acoustic live version of The Liminal, if you want to compare and contrast and marvel at her voice.
Sitting with this album and the reading the press Chelsea has done for it, I understand they are just more happy, confident, more themselves, perhaps freer of their demons – whether this was addiction or self-doubt or trauma. This album encapsulates the transformation process.
Chelsea has spoken extensively about getting sober from alcohol in early 2021, during the writing process of this album. She says in an Associated Press interview that this created openness and space in creativity – sobriety as a gateway to something else. Rebirth and transformation are explicit themes of the album but I also hear a lot about letting go of a relationship that was toxic. Chelsea is extremely private about their life but they mentioned that the themes of this album mirrored their life. I keep coming back to the song Everything Turns Blue and its language of healing – but not yoga and self-care healing, something more intense and grubby. Perhaps acknowledging that the process of leaving a relationship can bring the most intense feelings and interpreting that intensity as sexual or spiritual.
I miss the deep darkness of Chelsea Wolfe’s music and the way she’d begin songs with a dark fart of noise distortion, but if music is an expression of emotional state, it’s not fair to require the self-destructiveness that creates this music from an artist in every album. After all as listeners we are just tourists in their darkness.
In her interview in Witchology Magazine, Spring 2024, Chelsea said “I think of this as a liminal album for me. It’s in between these old and new chapters or even books, maybe. And I’m kind of embracing that stage.”
Maybe this album is a kind of clearing house of emotions. I’m here for the journey and excited to see what comes next.
The oracle card I pulled on the Chelsea’s virtual deck was Tunnel Lights. Here’s the stunning video shot in Columbia.
Buy her music and her merch here: https://chelseawolfe.com/
Don’t just stream it, you bums. She’s worth more than $0.003.