Chelsea Wolfe, L.A.’s gothic queen supreme, burst onto the underground music scene with her debut album The Grime and The Glow, in 2010. A year later, she followed that with the critically acclaimed Apokalypsis. Both albums are powerful testaments to Wolfe’s abilities as a songwriter, switching seamlessly between intimate and acoustic folk to grandiose guitar riffs and pounding drums without lapsing into overdetermined eclecticism. Behind all of it Wolfe’s powerful voice jumps out at the listener like a predator in the dark. Since releasing her fourth album, Pain is Beauty, last year, the California native has burst out of the underground and onto playlists everywhere.

Wolfe recently teamed with Mark Pellington, who directed music videos “Jeremy” for Pearl Jam and “Rooster” for Alice In Chains as well as the movie The Mothman Prophecies, to produce an hour-long film, Lone (of which the video for ”Feral Love” is an excerpt). The dialogue in the film is based on the lyrical universe of Pain is Beauty. 

We spoke with the singer about making Lone, horse statues, and directing your anger at the sun.

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photo by Jason Speakman

words by J. Edward Keyes

See more photos from the Music Hall Of Williamsburg show at Brooklyn Vegan

The evolution of Chelsea Wolfe has been a marvel to behold. On her first two records, the genuinely terrifying The Grime and the Glow and Apokalypsis, she sang like someone trapped in a snowstorm, her panicked, desperate vocals rising up from a blinding cloud of hypnotic guitars and funereal percussion. To listen to them felt like eavesdropping on a bleak, late-night Ouija board session, strange messages from the beyond rattling through a foreboding haze of sound. Her shows at the time mirrored that distinctly occult mood — she took the stage adorned in snaking, high-priestess headdresses, and each performance felt like a ritual, secret and forbidding.

She’s gradually, purposefully refined her approach since then. On the recent Abyss, one of the year’s best rock records, her melodies have become more focused and deliberate; she’s traded the amorphous haze of guitars for the pummeling, deep-set howl of doom metal, the perfect contrast to her voice. The net effect is just as chilling as her early work, but feels more dire and more severe. If Wolfe used to feel like the conduit for sinister spirits, on Abyss she feels like the conjurer, no longer passively allowing evil to overtake her but, instead, willing it into effect.

All of that dark energy was on display over the course of her riveting performance at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on September 9, where Wolfe felt not so much like a singer but a medium, powerfully commanding the unreal into existence. Gorgeously grim opener “Carrion Flowers” descended like a dark cloud, bone-rattling guitars colliding over and over as Wolfe’s voice — high, gorgeous, and unholy — strode majestically between. “Dragged Out” was eerier still, protracted and lurching, great heaves of sound stopping suddenly for Wolfe to howl in the silence between them. And during the death-march dirge “We Hit a Wall,” Wolfe draped her voice like gauze over the spidery chords, making the song’s message of romantic desolation feel like an Old Testament curse.

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photo by Nick Fancher

Chelsea Wolfe has been winning high praise for her music since her label debut album The Grime And The Glow blended surreal goth imagery and shoe-gazing textures with angular, experimental guitar work. Her follow-up album, the stunning Apokalypsis showed that Wolfe was no one-trick pony, and since then each of her 3 further albums have developed in style and vision. Her most recent album, Abyss, is a staggering piece of art that cements the artist as a legend on the underground music scene.

Ahead of her performance at this week’s FYF festival in Los Angeles, CA, ARTISTdirect caught up with Chelsea to discuss the artists world view, her most recent project, and the half-written songs just waiting to be a next album.

Where in the world are you right now?

Prague. I fall in love with this city more and more each time. Just ended a short European tour, played a few festivals. Here’s a picture I took from my hotel window early this morning when I couldn’t sleep, and here’s a picture I took yesterday of a gravestone angel at the Vyšehrad cemetery, final resting place of Alphonse Mucha.

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Chelsea Wolfe performs “Noorus” from the album The Grime And The Glow live from the Converse Rubber Tracks studio at SXSW in Austin. 
 

The first sights and sounds released from the upcoming Chelsea Wolfe album “Abyss,” out this Summer, 2015 on Sargent House.

The video above was filmed in and around Dallas, TX and at Elmwood Recording studio. Featuring Chelsea Wolfe, Ben Chisholm, Dylan Fujioka, Ezra Buchla, and special guests Mike Sullivan (Russian Circles)  D.H. Phillips (True Widow) and producer John Congleton.

Get to know her on facebook , Twitter , Chelsea Wolfe Site

The lo-fi fuzz and red raw minimalism of Chelsea Wolfe’s 2010 debut outing The Grime and the Glow feel like a distant memory when listened to alongside Abyss. Her fifth and most tonally diverse offering to date, it serves as a fitting reminder of the sonic distance she’s covered over her deceptively short career, which, lest we forget, spans a mere five years. That’s five albums in five years; a prolific output in anyone’s book.  

Perhaps this quick-fire approach can explain how she’s been able to arrive at her current destination in such an impressive time frame. These days, most artists struggle to put out a record once every two or three years; years spent ruminating on and refining material to the point that audible progress gets lost in the search for polished perfection. Yet, where others endeavour to cloak or eradicate the perceived blemishes and imperfections of their art with extensive recording and production sessions, Wolfe, it seems, is more concerned with capturing the emotion and intensity of the moment.

That said, the signature moves that make Wolfe and her work so unique are evident as ever throughout Abyss, blending all of the touchstones from each of her previous efforts and coaxing them into previously uncharted territories.

The result is a record that showcases Wolfe at her gothic, folk-infused best. Seamlessly woven between dense layers of crashing guitar and industrial electronica lie brittle vocals and disarmingly infectious melodies, shedding just enough light to offset the weight of the darkness.

How, then, did she and the band arrive at this new, all-encompassing sound?

“We are a band that is constantly striving to grow and try new things, but the way our sound has developed has been really natural and instinctual,” Wolfe explains. “I’m really lucky to play with such great musicians and working with my co-producer, Ben Chisholm, has taken this project in such a cool direction - we’ve been able to combine our inspirations to create something new.”

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Get a rare look inside Sargent House, the taste-making indie label and management company based in the hills of Eastside Los Angeles. Chelsea Wolfe, Deafheaven, Sargent House founder Cathy Pellow, and label head Marc Jetton all appear in this profile piece by FM TV for FUSE TV.

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