As album titles go, Abyss is pretty damn fitting. To listen to it is to fall into – or get dragged into – a dark, eerie, gothic place. If we’re honest, Hot Press is a little apprehensive about talking to its creator. What a pleasure, then, to find Chelsea Wolfe high in the Californian mountains, beaming like the west-coast sun.
“It’s not like I wake up on a sunny day and think ‘No, I need to be gloomy,’” she laughs. “I just create what comes to mind, when it comes to mind. In any case, I’ve developed the ability to get in a zone, then snap out of it and be normal again.”
It’s just as well, because her latest album is, quite literally, a downer. While she’s never been known for bubblegum pop – albums called Pain Is Beauty and Apokalypsis speak for themselves – Abyss is her most disorienting, heavy and evocative work to date. Packed with imagery of falling into despair and nothingness, it’s fair to say it’s pretty bleak.
“It was largely an unconscious choice, but I wanted to create that sort of feeling. It’s a hard balance to strike, to make it heavy but not overpowering. But even titles like ‘Dragged Out’ and ‘Maw’ – it’s definitely something I keep coming back to.”
Before the album process, she told press she wanted to torment herself for new material, to relieve boredom. Hyperbole? “I think I’m always bored with myself,” she confesses. “I guess that’s why I keep creating new things. But I wanted to torment myself a bit, and in a way I did. I would put myself in situations with just my instruments and a recorder. I forced myself to dig deep into my own head, to memories and thoughts that I didn’t want to confront. It wasn’t an easy process, I would come out of those writing sessions physically shaking.”
A large reason for that was wrestling with issues surrounding dreams. Matters of somnambulism and the unconscious mind were a mainstay of the American Gothic; the period’s equivalent of zombies and vampires in Hollywood these days. It wasn’t until after the record’s completion, though, that Chelsea saw how heavy the influence was.
“I didn’t recognise how much my own issue with sleep paralysis had affected the record,” she shrugs. “I never really talked about it before, because I didn’t realise it was that weird. I’ve always had problems with sleep and dreams. My parents brought me to a clinic as a kid, because I was constantly thrashing about and yelling in my sleep. I’d wake up in the morning, but the demons from my dreams were still in the room. I’d lash out, thinking someone was actually there. After a while I got a grasp on it, but it still affected my daily mindset. I’d get paranoid, or overthink things. Waking up to that is pretty different to waking up to the sunshine.”
“I just started to become more curious,” she continues. “I got a Jung book called Memories, Dreams, Reflections and explored it a little bit. I thought it was just some strange thing that I had, and that no-one else would understand.
”For an artist who had previously credited inspiration from without, this marks something of a change. With that in mind, would it be fair to call this the most personal album of her career to date?
“I go back and forth on that with every album, whether it’s personal or not. I do like to separate my personal and musical life.” She pauses. “It does creep in every so often, lines here and there that are intensely personal. But I would never reveal exactly who it’s about, or what it’s about. Music can be therapeutic, but not for my own relationships or something like that.”