The Healing
Self-examination and emotional purging are common themes explored on Chelsea Wolfe’s albums, but her latest, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is her most intimate yet. The experimental singer-songwriter, who has previously collaborated with Russian Circles and Myrkur, discusses rebirth, cutting ties with the past and a new-found sobriety that found her swapping dark folk and gothic blues for a more electronic sound.
Words: Cheri Faulkner Images: Ebru Yildiz
Rising from the deep blues: Chelsea Wolfe.
“I’ve already learned so much from this album through writing and recording it, and it’s been such a wonderful guide for me. I look forward to what else it has to teach me.”
Chelsea Wolfe began work on the harrowingly beautiful She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She back in 2020, when she and her band were unable to get together in person to write.
“We sent ideas back and forth and the songs began to collage together,” she explains. “And as time went on we were eventually able to gather together to finish the demos.”
Despite the album’s construction beginning in 2020, it wasn’t until early 2022 that Wolfe and her band managed to get into the studio with producer Dave Sitek (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bat For Lashes, Pussy Riot, among others), to record the final versions. The follow-up to 2019’s bluesy dark folk-inspired Birth Of Violence was created during Wolfe’s process of getting sober following an alcohol addiction that, by all interpretations and her own admission, had controlled her life for quite some time. Those themes of rebirth and transformation are prevalent throughout.