Chelsea Wolfe

There is a core element to Chelsea Wolfe’s music—a kind of urgent spin on America’s desolation blues—that’s existed throughout the entirety of her career. It manifested in the lo-fi bedroom recording experiments of her debut album The Grime and the Glow (2010), the electrified dirges of Apokalypsis (2011) & Hiss Spun (2017), the electronic embellishments and distorted growl of Pain is Beauty (2013) & Abyss (2015), and the reclusive reflections of her 2019 acoustic album Birth of Violence. At the center, there has always been Wolfe’s woeful longing and beguiling gravity, though the framework for compositions has continuously evolved. Wolfe’s latest album, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, found her in the studio with producer Dave Sitek, creating her most forward-facing music to date. At once dense and minimal, raw and opulent, intimate and expansive, the production cracks apart and then rebuilds—heavy rock guitars dissolve into trip-hop beats; the vocal delivery is both hushed and soaring, ethereal and grounded, and full of carefully articulated details.