Chelsea Wolfe graces Pittsburgh’s spooky season with ethereal new record The Dark

Chelsea Wolfe wanted something with many meanings when she named her latest album, so she settled on The Dark. While that’s arguably the word used most to describe her output, her body of work is hardly a monolithic lack of light. Just as on her previous nine albums , Wolfe works in doomy, heavy metal sounds and sparse acoustic guitar sounds with little time spent in between.   While the 42-year-old California native has all sorts of associations with darkness, she mostly finds dark themes to be reminders of all the mysteries that surround us. “It doesn’t mean dark equals bad and light equals good,” she says. “That’s not where I’m coming from.” “I wanted to call the album something simple because it can encapsulate so many different things. There’s so much beautiful dark art,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “Some people might look at that and think of it as dark and scary, but it’s also dark and beautiful. We’re drawn to it because it’s strange and liminal and speaks to something of the other realm.” “The other realm” has more meaning for Wolfe than for most. Some of her earliest memories of shadows are experiences from the sleep paralysis that’s afflicted her for much of her life.  Sleep paralysis is the temporary inability to move when waking or falling asleep. During these periods, which can last up to 20 minutes, patients often experience vivid visual and tactile hallucinations as well as the panic of helplessness. “When I was really young, I saw these shadow figures in my room. I didn’t understand where they came from. Obviously, I still don’t quite understand,” she says. “It introduced me to the concept that there is more than just the physical realm.” The Dark by CHELSEA WOLFE For the first time, Wolfe worked with a co-writer on The Dark . Feeling her mental health was too fragile to go it alone, Wolfe partnered with Jenn Decilvio, who she says is her “extroverted, high-energy, fast-paced opposite.” In t