Chelsea Wolfe
"A full-on ride, and one that finds her at her most commanding and climactic yet." – NPR
“Hopefully Hiss Spun is the album that transcends Chelsea Wolfe into superstardom” – The Skinny
“Hiss Spun is her most complete and dynamic offering to date, the definitive achievement thus far of an artist who has won a diverse and devoted fan base by being hard to define...” – Revolver
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe becomes empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. The flesh-and-bone of the material on Hiss Spun was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself... I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging.
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou (Converge), and features prominent guitar contributions by Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) throughout the album, and a guest spot from Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on the song “Vex.”
On tour now! Contact us with any requests!
RIYL: Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey, Portishead, Queens of the Stone Age, Garbage
TRY: #2, 9, 3, 8
DIRTY: #12
Download full album here:
https://www.piratepirate.com/downloads/
More Info Here:
http://chelseawolfe.net/
https://www.sargenthouse.com/chelsea-wolfe
https://www.facebook.com/cchelseawwolfe
https://twitter.com/cchelseawwolfe
https://www.instagram.com/cchelseawwolfe/