[PREORDER] Chelsea Wolfe - The Dark [Indie Exclusive]

The Dark is the sound of Chelsea Wolfe walking straight into the thing most artists spend a career avoiding. Her ninth album is a document of sobriety and transformation, written after a long stretch of self-examination, and it moves through the darkness rather than around it. The result is the most immediate and physical record she has made, sharpening her long-running blend of mysticism, memory, grief, and desire into something heavier and more direct.

That heaviness has help. The Dark was made with producer and co-writer Jennifer Decilveo and Wolfe's longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm, backed by a cast pulled from some of the most distinctive rock records of the last two decades: Robin Finck and Justin Meldal-Johnsen of Nine Inch Nails, Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age, Matt Chamberlain of Pearl Jam, and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint. Lead single and opening track "Cold" sets the tone, arriving with a séance-themed video, before the ten-song run works its way to closer "Dancer in the Sky."

For an artist who has spent the better part of two decades mapping the territory between gothic folk and doom, The Dark feels less like a departure than a reckoning: beauty and ruin pressed up against each other with nothing to soften the contact. It's her most confident statement in years.