Chelsea Wolfe faces her future

It’s the eve of the full moon when I speak to Chelsea Wolfe. Tonight, she will pull a tarot card and try to make peace with whatever archetype of the future she is faced with, before putting the past month behind her. At 7 a.m., when the moon reaches its peak illumination, Wolfe will make good on the promise of letting go.

The proto-gothic singer, with one hoof in sepulchral folk, the other in darkwave and doom metal, repeats this process of attaching and detaching every 30 days, a cyclical practice that’s also part of a larger arc that has defined her life since 2020. She's attempting both to slough off a past self and remold from the corpuscles of old flesh her future self she’s still yet to shake the hand of; she’s not who she was, though she’s not quite who she will be either — “The calmer self of my future,” she says.

Most songwriters and storytellers begin on the other side of transformation and tell their stories in reverse. Yet this approach conveniently elides the thornier, often more senseless reality of growth, the kind that Wolfe doesn’t shy away from on her She Reaches Out trilogy. She began the trilogy this year with her eighth album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, which was followed by the Undone remixes EP, and capped off now with the Unbound EP, her final installment that doesn’t signal a conclusion so much as it does a step closer to transformation. On it, the synthesizer-heavy, Depeche Mode-like sheen of the album is pared back and Wolfe’s previously distant vocals are central and grounded in the mix. She sounds like the potential of herself.

Bracing herself for the new moon in Aries (“Everyone keeps warning me that it's going to be agitating and a bit angry and fiery,” she says), Wolfe spoke to The FADER about the EP, arriving November 15, the messiness of the in-between, as well as the online witch scene.

The FADER: Since you’ve had some time to marinate in the music and answer questions about it, I’m going to start off with the most loaded question I can think of: What is your music in spiritual pursuit of and how has that purpose been clarified to you with the release of this music?

Chelsea Wolfe: I think spiritually this music has been in search of alignment and authenticity and expansiveness for me as a person, as an artist. It’s about being okay with this messy in-between phase, which I've sort of lovingly given the title of The Void — this sort of void space that is scary and full of shadows — but is also full of potential and beautiful mystery.

Why a trilogy? Is there some spiritual resonance in the number three?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the number three is obviously a very spiritual number in many different paths, and the title She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She is about the past version of yourself connecting with the present version of yourself, connecting with the future version of yourself. So I did feel like it was appropriate to have three versions of these songs, the album and the remixes, and now the sort of acoustic stripped down versions.

Do you see these different versions as tenses? Do you ascribe them past, present, future?

I haven't thought about it like that. I guess part of why I wanted to do these stripped down versions is because I started writing the album songs in 2020 and I didn't get to record them until early 2022. So here at the end of 2024, I think this was my way of reconnecting with and reclaiming these songs to where I'm at now. You know, I'm at this different point in my life, even vocally, where I feel like I'm becoming more comfortable with where my voice is at now and I'm enjoying singing more. I wanted to focus on that and just strip it down to the most basic elements of the song so that I could just focus on the joy of singing. So, yeah, I do feel like the Unbound EP is very reflective of present me.

When I wrote the album, I felt like it was sort of my future self giving me a guide on how to sever ties and let go of things that were really just harming me and holding me back, whether it was things within myself or a relationship or a business relationship. I feel like these new versions reflect that growth within myself.

Was there a certain moment or event that triggered this growth?

I think it stemmed from getting sober from alcohol in 2021. I really had a newfound clarity and was going to therapy and really working through a lot of stuff and facing things that I hadn't faced in a long time. I keep saying I'm still in the place that I wrote this album from, but I've also grown a lot as well. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel now and step into what is next.

This album of growth and transformation happens to follow a change in label management. I’m curious, did you ever feel pressured to present a more pained version of yourself previously?

Not really, I was always expressing where I was at. If anything, I feel like the people I used to work with wanted me to be prettier or more presentable, and I think I rebelled against it by expressing my messier, sometimes sloppier side. That's probably not a good thing in the end. I do think that in the past I was pressured, as a lot of woman-presenting people in this industry are to, you know, I don't know. I almost don't even want to get into it. It’s a pain point.

Let’s move on from it. I read in another interview that you met your future self during a hypnotherapy session prior to writing the album. Do you feel you’ve finally become that self, or is she still just out of reach?

I do think that was maybe the current version of myself because she seemed a bit more joyful and sober. That's more where I'm at now than when I was.

Your grandmother introduced you to spirituality and witchcraft from an early age. Was there a moment when she told you that you were especially porous to the universe’s energies?

I don't know if she ever told me outright, it was just a connection that we had. She had learned things like aromatherapy and Reiki, and she was basically practicing on me as she was learning. I think that naturally opened me up and made me curious about other realms other than the physical.

Do you have a community of people in which you practice spirituality with and what do those practices look like?

I do. I live in the mountains where it’s a bit isolated, so I don't have people locally, unfortunately, so a lot of it is online with people I’ve met in person or have been on tour with. Pam Grossman is a friend and fellow witch of mine who does online monthly coven meetings and I'll attend those on Patreon. Then when I'm on tour, I make a point to gather fellow witches when I can and hang out with them somewhere special.

Back to the EP, what made you pick out these songs specifically?

I had the opportunity to do a small showcase, where I was doing these stripped-down versions of the songs. That's kind of where this idea originated from. It was in this barn in Los Angeles, and so I didn't have the opportunity to bring my full band. I did these with my bandmate Ben on piano and me on guitar. These are the songs that translated most naturally into that form.

You end with a cover of Spiritbox’s “Cellar Door.” What about that song spoke to you?

I really loved that EP of theirs. The lyrics in the chorus [“Who could've known I would fall so hard starting over”] really speak to the difficulty of transformation. I started a TikTok last year, mostly posting little snippets of my songs in an acoustic version, and then I just started singing “Cellar Door.” The lyrics really resonated with me and I felt they fit into the world of the EP. It was also a great chance to meet Courtney [LaPlante, Spiritbox’s lead vocalist] and become friends and, you know, appreciate each other's music.

One of the lyrics on the EP that I’ve really gotten stuck on is from “Whispers in the Echo Chamber:” “Become my own fantasy, twist the old self into poetry.” I'm curious to know what your relationship with your old self is like now, and what it means for a past self to be your own fantasy or point of poetry?

That part, as well as a few others on the album, are meant to be affirmations to help me as I'm singing them. It’s a marker to remember your own power, to be confident. I felt like that lyric encapsulated this idea of the past and present twisting together and becoming this new version of yourself.

How would the people who know you and love you say that you've changed?

Sadly, I've probably become a bit less social because I've needed to really spend a lot of time alone to do the work that I want to do, to prioritize the healing that I want to do.

And some of that has been done in community, because I think that's also really important, to maintain your friendships, whether you feel like you're in the exact same place you were or not. I think I’m a lot calmer as a person. A bit more present.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.