The credits on Chelsea Wolfe's ninth album read like a lineup built for volume. Robin Finck and Justin Meldal-Johnsen came out of Nine Inch Nails, Troy Van Leeuwen out of Queens of the Stone Age, Stella Mozgawa out of Warpaint, Matt Chamberlain out of Pearl Jam. Every one of those names is tied to music that knows how to fill a room. What they built with Wolfe on The Dark does the opposite, a record that keeps clearing space rather than occupying it, restraining musicians who are very good at not restraining themselves so that Wolfe's voice sits at the center of the mix in a way it hasn't before. Producer and co-writer Jennifer Decilveo, working with Wolfe for the first time alongside her longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm, pushed the songs toward bigger, more open vocal melodies instead of denser arrangements, and that shift carries through all ten tracks, from opener "Cold" through "Seethe," "Humours," "Swallower," "Halo," the title track, "Turn the Key," "I'm Not There," "Death Is Not The End," and closer "Dancer in the Sky."
That same instinct, pointing a lot of firepower at almost nothing, shows up somewhere none of the record's reviews have looked. Before The Dark had a release date attached, Wolfe partnered with the natural perfume house Heretic on a five-scent collection called Ghosts. Heretic's own account of the collaboration says the fragrances weren't built around the album cycle after the fact. They were composed in the same room as it, with Wolfe's new songs playing on repeat in the studio while the scents took shape, which makes Ghosts less a celebrity tie-in and more a second, wearable draft of the same material.
The five scents commit to the same restraint as the band does. Spectral Grace is built around the idea of an abandoned Hollywood soundstage, glamour with the crew gone home, which sits close to the album's own tagline about beauty meeting ruin. Ektoplasma is composed as cold vapor settling into ambergris and dust caught in moonlight, a fragrance built entirely around residue, something that has already left the room, which tracks with the meditations on death and ancestral memory that close the record out. Shadow People leans on petrichor and oakmoss to conjure the feeling of being watched from the margins, unresolved, which lines up with the record's turn toward reclaiming the self on songs like "Turn the Key." Nobody involved spells this out as a literal map from song to bottle, and Heretic never claims one. But both projects came from the same person in the same months, working through the same material, and the overlap is there to smell as much as it is to hear.
Taken together, The Dark isn't a ten-song album with a fragrance line bolted on for press. It's one idea about becoming the darkest thing in the room, worked out twice, once by asking a rock band to whisper and once by asking perfume to behave like a presence instead of a product. Wolfe takes both versions on the road this fall on her Dark world tour with Jonathan Hultén, and whichever way the record reaches you, worn or played, it's the same year of the same woman's life either way.
Listen to The Dark on Bandcamp, out now via Loma Vista Recordings. The Ghosts collection is available through Heretic, and tour dates are up at chelseawolfe.com.
