Chelsea Wolfe announces ninth album ‘The Dark,’ out August 21 via Loma Vista, and shares new single ‘Cold’ ahead of a 43-date world tour
Chelsea Wolfe has spent fifteen years making records about being haunted. On her ninth, she is finally interested in who is doing the haunting. The Californian songwriter announced The Dark on Tuesday (July 21), out August 21 via Loma Vista Recordings, and shared “Cold,” a goth-folk centerpiece that pairs an unusually direct pop instinct with her familiar off-kilter menace. It arrives with a 43-date world tour already booked through the end of the year, and it follows 2024’s industrial-leaning She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She with a deliberate turn toward bone-bare arrangements.
The album’s emotional architecture is unusually explicit for an artist who tends to work in fog. Press materials describe Wolfe saying goodbye to relationships, aspects of identity, and, most consequentially, patterns of self-abandonment. She has framed the record around embracing the unknown rather than relitigating the past.
“The ghosts are haunted by the living just as much as the living are haunted by the ghosts,” she said in a statement. “On this album, I’m not pointing the finger at anyone.” Speaking to NME, she connected the shift to her sobriety and the deeper work that followed it, describing the record as a reckoning with entering the second half of her life. On the title track she asks who she has become, a line she says is about meeting herself where she actually is rather than repeating an old shape.
A Cast Assembled From Her Own History
The personnel reads like a survey of Wolfe’s twenty-year orbit. Longtime collaborator Ben Chisolm returns, joined by new songwriting partner Jennifer Decilveo, Nine Inch Nails live guitarist Robin Finck, session drummer Matt Chamberlain (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple), and members of Icelandic post-punk trio Kaelan Mika.
Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen turns in the solo on “Swallower,” reprising a partnership that began with 2017’s “16 Psyche.” That Hiss Spun-era connection matters: it locates The Dark inside the heavier lineage of her catalog even as the arrangements strip back.
The ten-track sequence runs “Cold,” “Seethe,” “Humours,” “Swallower,” “Halo,” “The Dark,” “Turn the Key,” “I’m Not There,” “Death Is Not the End,” and “Dancer in the Sky.” Two of those, the title track and “Death Is Not the End,” surfaced in June as a double A-side, the latter arriving with a video shot at California’s otherworldly Mono Lake. “Cold” gets a séance-themed clip directed by Magdalena Wosinska, who also shot the album’s press images, and it is the most immediately melodic thing here, all restraint and hush until it isn’t.
The Dark World Tour Runs Through December
The touring plan is the largest of her career. The Dark World Tour opens September 16 at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre and moves through Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and New York’s Town Hall on October 6, before swinging south through Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, and Austin and closing the North American leg October 23 in Los Angeles. Jonathan Hultén opens the US dates. The European run picks up November 21 in Utrecht and continues to December 19 in Athens, with A.A. Williams supporting. Ahead of all of it, Wolfe plays an intimate show at London’s The Dome on August 18, two days before headlining ArcTanGent in Bristol.
The timing lands her in a moment that has caught up to her. Gothic folk, doom-adjacent atmospherics, and the aesthetics of the occult have moved from the margins toward the center of alternative music, helped along by her own soundtrack work on A24’s X and placements on Game of Thrones.
Wolfe, meanwhile, is currently the face of Heretic Parfum’s Ghosts collection, the brand’s first partnership with a musician, which she used to tease the record through weeks of cryptic imagery. The genre borrowed her vocabulary. On The Dark, she seems most interested in what is left when you stop performing it.
