Chelsea Wolfe has always moved freely between doom, folk, industrial music and gothic abstraction, but Seethe finds the darkness taking on a more immediate, accessible shape. Built around a tense, muscular rhythm and a central guitar line from Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen, the track has the direct pull of alternative rock without smoothing away Wolfe’s more unsettling instincts. The vocal shifts from a low, controlled threat into a bloodcurdling howl, turning the track's concept into something memorable and genuinely feral.
The immediacy runs throughout Wolfe’s ninth album, The Dark. Following the dense electronic architecture of She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, the record strips its arrangements back toward guitar, bass and drums, leaving more room for traditional songcraft, refined choruses and Wolfe’s increasingly exposed vocal presence. Produced and co-written with Jennifer Decilveo alongside longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm, it leans closer to brooding alternative and gothic rock than the doom-laden extremity of earlier releases. The music is certainly more approachable, but its broodiness remains real, having moved into sharper focus.
The visual for Seethe draws out another quality that has always existed beneath Wolfe’s severity, the sensuality that's inherent in Wolfe's work. Its slow, intimate framing turns every movement and glance into a provocation, placing the body at the center of the song’s simmering intimidation, as though desire and violence are occupying the same enclosed space. That lustful charge makes its menace feel more immediate..
The Dark is out now digitally through Loma Vista Recordings, with physical editions arriving September 18th, 2026.
Photo by Magdalena Wosinska
ZR