Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

The Quietus

“It seems like the world has been in tears for months,” Chelsea Wolfe says in the press notes for her new album. “And then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning.”

It would be misguided, then, to expect Hiss Spun to pulse with joy or whimsy. This is an album with a look of profound incomprehension plastered across its face, the work of a songwriter whose quest for a settled state of mind turns its back on the outside world and instead probes inward.

Sonically this means that Hiss Spun picks up where Wolfe’s 2015 album Abyss left off, hybridising metal, electronic, industrial and – for want of a better adjective – gothic influences to sculpt a thoroughly contemporary take on all four genres that variously evokes Marissa Nadler, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and Massive Attack. Riding the faders this time is Kurt Ballou of Converge, who gives Wolfe’s dark impulses a lustre that was missing from Abyss.

While appropriately miasmic and gargantuan, the textural layering sometimes feels too substantial, but where it succeeds Ballou turns airlessness into a virtue and Wolfe’s unwaveringly committed vocal performances rise to the occasion – as on the chaotic electro throb of ‘Vex’, where Aaron Turner of Isis and Sumac unleashes a series of orc-like howls as if trying to escape the descent into hell, and the closing ‘Scrape’, which hurtles towards a cliff edge with all the wide-eyed abandon of early Killing Joke.

She brought in Mike Sullivan of Russian Circles to expand her palette on parts of Abyss, and Wolfe does the same here with Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens Of The Stone Age, who joins Wolfe’s long-time co-pilot Ben Chisholm and drummer Jess Gowrie in building not so much a wall of sound as a pyramid, exemplified by the anthemic, down-tuned drama of ‘16 Psyche’.

For the most part Hiss Spun comprises what can be succinctly described as downtempo dirges with a handful of diversions – ‘Offering’, whose musky electronica and melodic convention make it the closest thing to pop on this album, the torn folk-waltz of 'Two Spirit’, the rapid stomp of ‘Particle Flux’ and perhaps the album’s most singular cut, ‘Twin Fawn’, which juxtaposes quasi-flamenco verses with monumentally heavy choruses before gunning for the exit on a wave of distressed guitar. Whether this reliance on slow burners is a good thing will largely depend on your appetite for diversity.

Arguably the weakest aspect of Hiss Spun is the hit-and-miss nature of its ability to land blows to your gut - a goal which tends to be fundamental to music of this stripe. While it would be folly to cast even a shred of doubt on Wolfe’s commitment, integrity and emotional candour, on passages here they are submerged or silenced by the pursuit of ever-bigger sonic highs. Where the swell subsides, as on 'Two Spirit’, with Wolfe’s voice accompanied by little more than acoustic guitar, the calm is ablutionary.

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Drowned In Sound 80

If the guitar seems familiar, that's because Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of The Stone Age) is at the reins, and he's brought his Songs for the Deaf-adjacent A game. The combination of Wolfe's evanescence (absolutely an emo double-entendre that I won't let go unnoticed) and Leeuwen's dirty earthiness, is one that totally works. Their marriage of brutality and tenderness cleans the sky of its smoke-clouds in '16 Psyche', before raining fire in 'Vex'. The song stands out as the album's closest thing to doom-metal, as Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom) screams alongside a spinning Catherine Wheel of blazing guitars and pelting drums. After the attack comes a warren of effects and distortion. Wolfe softens after the feast, singing with a head voice that sounds remarkably like FKA Twigs. It's a moment of brief hypnagogic gentleness, but a gentleness to be cautious of – like a daytime scene in a horror film. "My finger is in your wound" she breathes. And on 'Particle Flux': "though you tried to swallow me whole, I did not succumb." Although it's not with total conviction, as she concedes: "you know, in this hell I am torn."

Wolfe has always been torn between being on the defence and the attack; between the tender and the brutal. For the first half of the album, she battles with bloody claws. She is all slaughter and metal (although her take on it is rendered into something more like stoner-doom metal), and the thing with heavy metal, is that it is all rage. It rejects the myth of stability; it resists the idea of production. It is a lifelong temper tantrum. However, the palm-muted strings and hushed lullaby of the album's best track, 'Twin Fawn' prick lightly like tickled goosebumps. Then, another hair-splitting bomb goes off. "You cut me open! You lived inside me!" Wolfe rages, as she seeks revenge upon her prey. But this time, the tenderness is retained - it's an uncannily serene moment of bothness, or perhaps more accurately, in-betweeness.

From 'Twin Fawn' onward, the album exhibits exactly what makes her so precious. No longer relying on metal's singular obliteration, nor fluttering towards the edges of ethereality, Wolfe commands both directions while lodging herself in-between them. The feedback levels are drawn out, the amp is in overdrive, and Wolfe no longer has us anchored to the seed idea of the song, but now has us listlessly drifting alongside it. In the aptly-named 'Static Hum', she draws our attention away from her creation, and towards the material that she cannot helm. We're drawn into the grey noise between the beats, into an abyss that has yet to be made pregnant, in those regions of doleful, sorrowful shades. And after the album's last desperately hopeless gush, Wolfe is swallowed by her own feedback.

What Hiss Spun does, though it begins with a brutish feast and middles with a moment of tenderness, is draw us towards the liminal. It doesn't seek to make darkness visible, but rather exposes that which isn't supposed to be: the in-between. Wolfe works like torchlight shining into the forest at night, when the personality of leaves is changed. Nevertheless, though Hiss Spun probably won't end up as the best of her career, it may well be Wolfe's best so far.

Pitchfork 72

Chelsea Wolfe dives headfirst into sludge metal and creates a unique space where sweetness can be heavy and contact is always uncomfortable.