The Dark

On her eighth album, 2024’s <i>She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She</i>, Chelsea Wolfe recruited TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek for a largely electronic exploration of her recent sobriety. For its follow-up, <i>The Dark</i> (a title California’s reigning goth-folk maven had somehow not used before), the singer-songwriter found herself drawn back to a slow-burning rock sound. With producer Jennifer Decilveo and long-time collaborator Ben Chisholm, Wolfe built the songs of her ninth album from bare-bones acoustic guitar and piano sketches that occasionally evolve into epic goth-rock rippers. (See <b>“Seethe”</b>, a slice of driving ’80s rock, or the head-banging <b>“Swallower”</b>, with its howling vocals and a solo from Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen.) Elsewhere, Wolfe embraces a classically Californian folk sound with her own doomy twist: Evanescence meets <i>Ultraviolence</i>-era Lana on <b>“Halo”</b>, while <b>“Death Is Not the End”</b>, a mostly acoustic meditation on the afterlife until Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck unleashes a massive doom-metal outro. And on the title track, she honours the comforts of darkness—a fertile, earthy darkness in the deep woods where seeds can grow.