Chelsea Wolfe Embraces Her Inner Wisdom

Imagine a continuum of women’s wisdom and evolution in which we nurture ourselves and the next generation, passing on the whispered secret truths of how we avoid danger and stay united—from the genesis of women carving drawings into rocks, through their howled protests of witches at the Salem stakes, to the present day when we continue to battle for agency over their bodies against church and state. California musician Chelsea Wolfe was haunted and nourished by these whisperings and wisdoms, too, as they became immortal and ever-present on her new album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She.

Though Wolfe doesn’t allude to the poet herself, this album title seemingly recalls Sylvia Plath’s much-quoted line from her only novel, The Bell Jar: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is Wolfe’s most melodic, pop-friendly delivery to date. But don’t mistake this for easy listening; it is dark, immersive, ethereal and brutal. Beginning with “Whispers In The Echo Chamber,” there’s a serpentine, primal snarl of warped synths, layered and dissonant guitars and a lingering ghostly atmosphere. Wolfe’s voice, alternating between hushed revelations and falsetto harmonies, segues between fragile and assured.

“The interesting thing about this album, and that song is that I wrote the songs and then, almost immediately after, I realized that I needed to actually live them,” Wolfe says. “The songs were demanding that of me, that you can’t just read the lyrics—you actually have to experience this so that, when you’re singing them, you know exactly what you’re singing about and you’re putting a lot more power into it.”

Living up to the demands of her songs required Wolfe to make two life-altering decisions. “I can’t really remember if I wrote this [album] before or after getting sober from alcohol, but that was one of the things that I definitely needed to cut ties with in my own personal life,” she continues. “That was a pretty powerful change for me in early 2021 when I stopped doing that. Eventually, once the album was finished, I realized that it was time for me to move on from my current record label and management company and sort of start over and take this record back, claim it for myself and bring it to a place where I felt like it was gonna get the life that it deserved. I mean, maybe it doesn’t sound that big on paper, but those were two pretty big life changes for me that I feel like this album was the catalyst for.”

The soundscape flirts with industrialism, languishing in machine-driven corrosion, droning synths and a sense of vast, open space. It’s equal parts Nine Inch Nails, gothic opera and chopped-up, sexy trip-hop beats. Longtime collaborators returned to the fold to manifest Chelsea Wolfe’s ideas: Drummer Jess Gowrie, guitarist Bryan Tulao and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm worked with Wolfe remotely between 2020 until the end of 2021, brainstorming and writing with each other at a distance. Armed with the foundations of her seventh album, Wolfe approached TV On The Radio co-founder and producer Dave Sitek to shape the songs through a process of cutting up, smudging, sculpting and regeneration. It results in a cinematic, atmospheric density of sound that is held together, fiercely, by Wolfe’s crystalline vocals.

“I love TV On The Radio. It’s not like we specifically worked with him because of that project, but because I just was a fan of his work in general,” Wolfe says. “When we were talking with different producers for this album, we met up with Dave and I just felt like he understood and was excited about the energy of the songs and the weirdness of some of them, and he seemed excited to take them to even weirder levels.” Sitek’s studio was certainly set up for the task of transforming unusual songs into eerie new sonic territories. Wolfe recalls seeing it for the first time:

“He’s got a lot of great analog synthesizers, old and modern. And he’s got an entire wall of modular analog synths, which were really fun to play with. It was this big, robotic wall that you can run different sounds and vocals through, so that it comes out the other side sounding totally different and transformed,” she says. “It became really symbolic, actually. The way the studio is [laid out] mirrors the record itself, because there were these literal transformations of a guitar part or a vocal part getting run through this modular wall and coming out the other side as something totally new.”

Still, it was fundamental to come back to the core of She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She and ensure that it felt intimate, personal and—despite the wall of machines involved—really human. “I think it was balanced out by how straightforward the vocals are,” Wolfe continues. “There’s a lot going on in the background, but I think the vocals are mostly right into the microphone, really intimate. I like that balance of the wildness of all the synths and drum machine beats in the background and, then, the vocals just being right in your ear on top of all that.” The gothic, Tricky-esque trap that pulsates through “The Liminal,” or the swampy thud of synth percussion on “Eyes Like Nightshade,” harken back to trip-hop. The hooks of those tracks cohere smoothly with the slow-burn seduction of “Salt,” which arrives rich with ambient reverberation and spectral piano melodies.

Rather than become a major left turn for Wolfe, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is the culmination of over a decade of building her sonic palette and confidence to traverse genre. Pain Is Beauty flirted with electronica and broken beats in 2013, building on the gothic, percussive brutality of her 2010 debut, The Grime and the Glow. In 2015 and 2017, Abyss and Hiss Spun respectively ventured closer to experimental metal, before 2019’s Birth of Violence pared back the noise to find something more raw, pure and melodic. As immersive, multi-layered and dramatic as She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is, it maintains a solemn sincerity. Perhaps it is the poetic way Chelsea Wolfe can wring her lyrics from pathos.

“I don’t think I was really imagining one way or another whether this would be an album that you had to really sit and listen to, or whether it was going to be something that you could do something else along with. I was just focusing on each song really,” she reflects. “I gave each song a lot of time and energy and was making sure that I was being intentional with what I was saying, and then I realized that they were tracking this journey through a personal exodus and healing—and transformation, to use that word again. I think that these themes are really personal, but they’re also very universal. And I imagine that the things that I’m talking about and going through on these songs, a lot of people are [going through them], too.”

Listen to Chelsea Wolfe’s Daytrotter session from 2012 below.