Chelsea Wolfe Returns With Two Songs Pulling in Opposite Directions, and a 43-Date Tour

Chelsea Wolfe surfaced this week with two new songs and a 43-date tour, and the first thing worth saying about them is that they do not sound like one mood. "Death Is Not the End" and "The Dark" arrived together on June 24 through Loma Vista Recordings, her first solo music since 2024's "She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She." They are the opening signal of a ninth studio album she has not named yet.

Wolfe has spent fifteen years refusing to sit in one genre. She came up out of the California folk and noise underground, made a doom-metal record with "Hiss Spun," went almost fully electronic and industrial on the 2024 album, then turned around and cut a track called "Mean" with HEALTH. So the question with any new Wolfe release is never whether it will be heavy. It is which kind of heavy she has decided to chase this time. The answer here is two kinds at once.

Two songs, two directions

"Death Is Not the End" is the one that moves. It opens small, an acoustic guitar plucked clean and close, Wolfe's voice pushed down to a near-whisper. Then it stops being small. The track climbs into big dramatic guitar and a bassline that pulses underneath like something with a heartbeat. The personnel tells you she went looking for tension on purpose: longtime collaborator Ben Chisolm is there, but so is Robin Finck, the guitarist who has spent years in Nine Inch Nails, and Matt Chamberlain on drums, a session player whose credits run through Tori Amos and Fiona Apple. That is a room built for dynamics, quiet to loud and back, and the song uses all of it. The video keeps her among ocean scenes, which fits a track that works like a tide.

"The Dark" goes the other way. It stays folk. It stays pensive. The arrangement is built around a chorus where Wolfe sings, "Who says that I'll be gone now / A glimpse of what's to come down / The line, the pathless path, the sound / The stranger I've become now." Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint plays drums, with Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, and the restraint is the point. Where "Death Is Not the End" detonates, "The Dark" holds its breath. Putting the two out on the same day is a statement about range, and it lands because neither song is filler for the other.

If there is a worry in here, it is the obvious one for an artist this consistent: both songs are recognizably Chelsea Wolfe, and a listener who has followed her since "Pain Is Beauty" will hear the lineage immediately. Whether the ninth album finds a new room or refurnishes the old ones is the thing these two tracks cannot tell you yet. They are good. They are also a door, not the house.

The Dark World Tour

The bigger commitment is the road. Wolfe announced a 43-date run she is calling The Dark World Tour, with Jonathan Hultén opening the US leg and A.A. Williams opening Europe. It is a real tour, not a victory lap.

The US run opens September 16 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco and works east and south through October: Denver's Paramount, the Riviera in Chicago, the Masonic in Detroit, the Town Hall in New York, the Buckhead in Atlanta, the Texas Theatre in Dallas, finishing the American stretch at the Orpheum in Los Angeles on October 23. The European leg picks up November 21 in Utrecht and crosses Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, Munich, Paris, and lands in Athens on December 19.

Worth noting what kind of buildings these are. Curran. Paramount. The Town Hall. Casino de Paris. Wolfe is routing this through seated theaters and historic halls, not clubs and not sheds. That is a choice that suits music built on dynamics, the kind where a whisper has to carry to the back row before the guitars come in. Tickets are on sale this week.

Where this leaves things

Two songs, two modes, a ninth album with no title and no date, and a long winter tour through rooms with good acoustics. Wolfe has given herself room to make the record go anywhere. The smart move now is to take her at her word that this is only the first taste, and wait to hear what the other courses are.