She may not have started out playing heavy rock music, but she’s taken to it naturally, offering up a batch of songs both powerful and accessible. No doubt, this is an album of transition and escape, but it’s one that leads to an impressive new frontier for Wolfe. This is by far the loudest and most immediate of any Chelsea Wolfe album, which might end up being a stumbling block for listeners who favored her more esoteric ethereal-wave moments. Produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou, Hiss Spun is a celebration of stoner-rock fuzz, crunchy guitar riffs and muscular sludge pop, aided by the presence of some heavy music vets such as Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen and Isis/Sumac’s Aaron Turner. Wolfe’s fifth album, Hiss Spun, doesn’t just continue the maximalist sound of its predecessor, it finds Wolfe delivering a first: It’s a full-blown rock album. Yet over time, she’s adopted a more direct, musically heavy approach, as displayed on 2015’s Abyss, her John Congleton-produced career high, which saw the Los Angeles darkwave queen embracing industrial, doom metal and all things massive and crushing. Not to mention the fact that her association with a sort of second coming of goth, which merely added to her music’s dark presence. Even when strumming an acoustic guitar or getting lost in effects-laden electronics, Wolfe’s music evoked an intense emotional power. Her earliest records, such as The Grime and the Glow and Unknown Rooms, weren’t even loud, though they carried the weight of an overbearing gloom. Heaviness has always been a crucial element of Chelsea Wolfe‘s sound, though not in any obvious or literal way.

Chelsea wolfe hiss spun