Home at Last: Lifting the Veil on Chelsea Wolfe’s Music
Chelsea Wolfe is always exploring contrasts. The determined avant-garde musician has spent her career making music that’s as fascinating as it is uncategorizable. Her music touches on everything from metal to folk, and there’s something consistently, undefinably powerful about her live performances. Her latest record, Birth of Violence, which was released earlier this year, pushes Wolfe’s art even further. It’s a return to pure folk that somehow adds a more conceptual layer to her music. Since her first album, Wolfe hasn’t slowed down. She has explored different sounds throughout her 10-year career, built on six studio albums and long tours between Europe and the U.S.
Wolfe's music, complete with gloomy lyrics and distorted guitars, has been described as everything from doom metal to gothic folk. Her first official release, 2010's The Grime and The Glow, represents her solitary origins with the intimacy of her own voice and guitar. It was Wolfe’s first experimental, lo-fi sound that showcased her vocal ability.
When she initially began performing live, she suffered from extreme stage fright. Anxiety plagued her performances, and even small venues proved to be too intimidating. Wolfe would wear a black veil over her face. "I could barely handle being onstage for the first few years, and it's the reason it took me so long to start my career as a musician," she acknowledges.
It’s no surprise that she called her second album Apokalypsis, which is Greek for “lifting the veil.” Revolutions, realizations and epiphanies are the main themes of that record. “When I released Apokalypsis, I wanted to be more brave and also move forward from that so it didn’t become some sort of gimmick. I felt it was symbolic to move on and start to make eye contact. I still struggle with it sometimes but I find it’s a much better experience,” she admits. After that record she decided to no longer wear a veil on stage but chose to emphasize her face with make-up and accessories instead.
While experimenting, her anxieties were more manageable, the introverted songwriter acknowledges. This helped her to write her third record, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, as an attempt to reconnect with her folk roots and allow a few sunrays to dig into the gothic mausoleum she built on Apokalypsis. If Unknown Rooms appeared markedly different from her previous work, Wolfe's fourth studio album in 2013, Pain Is Beauty, leaned back toward the Goth influences of her earlier records. This time, however, she placed a greater emphasis on its electronic parts.
She wrote the album during the three years she was living in a big, old house near downtown Los Angeles. It had an effect on her music. “I felt trapped in a way, and there was some anger or torment about forcing myself to live in this new place that didn’t feel like home,” she admits. These feelings of constriction and frustration led her to take inspiration from the brutality of the real world, such as natural disasters and the human, emotional responses to them.
Wolfe grew up in Sacramento, California. Her father had a country band and they had a little home studio at home. When she was around 9 years old, she started sneaking in and making her own songs with just a Casio keyboard and her voice. She learned to play the guitar and continued writing and recording music secretly. For some reason she didn’t think she was good enough to be a musician. “I went to different colleges and followed different paths but music kept pulling me back to it,” she says.
Wolfe has also mentioned that she suffered from episodes of sleep paralysis as a child and through her teens. Sleep paralysis is the name for the condition in which a person, either while falling asleep or awakening, temporarily experiences an inability to move, speak, or react. These experiences became material for her albums Abyss (2015) and Hiss Spun (2017). Abyss was a rich submersion in sonic intensity, approaching on the industrial. With Hiss Spun, however, Wolfe dipped into sludge metal.
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography. With her sixth official album, Wolfe wanted to become empowered by embracing the chaos of the self. “The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self. I wanted to write some sort of escapist music, songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free.”
Hiss Spun led Wolfe to long tours between Europe and the U.S. In 2019, she decided to return to the reclusive nature of her earlier recordings, written and recorded in the solitude of her remote home in Northern California. The result of that choice is her new album Birth of Violence. “I think this album is really reflecting almost like a new beginning for me,” she says. “I finally stopped to really take stock of who I am, who I want to be as a person for the rest of my life, however long that might be, and who I am spiritually and give myself the time to really explore that.”
Every Chelsea Wolfe record begins with multiple approaches to music and although her creative journey has taken her around the world, Birth of Violence deliberately reflects a more singular, intimate atmosphere. “I definitely feel like there’s some kind of breath of relief with this album,” Wolfe says. “I was really pushing myself for a long time to keep going and keep going and this album is meant to really feel like home.”
Brooklyn Steel, November 1, 2019