Chelsea Wolfe Streams Hiss Spun via NPR First Listen

Chelsea Wolfe's newest album, Hiss Spun is available to hear in its entirety today via NPR First Listen. Wolfe has shared a string of acclaimed singles over the past several months, tracing the outline of an album that is as eclectic as it is singularly focused. Taken as a whole, Hiss Spun is a cohesive, defining statement that that embraces rock music wholeheartedly while continuing to incorporate elements of folk, electronic music, and full on heavy metal that have gained her a dedicated audience and critical acclaim. Hiss Spun will be released September 22nd on Sargent House.

STREAM: Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun via NPR First Listen

Wolfe's live performances show off her dynamism and have been universally praised. She will be touring this fall, with Youth Code opening all shows. Wolfe just this week also announced an in-store performance at Amoeba Records in Hollywood on September 29th.

Chelsea Wolfe Tour Dates

9/28 - Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room

9/29 - Los Angeles, CA - Amoeba Records

9/30 - Los Angeles, CA - The Regent Theater

10/2 - San Diego, CA - Belly Up Tavern

10/3 - Tucson, AZ - 191 Toole

10/4 - Phoenix, AZ - Crescent Ballroom

10/6 - Austin, TX - Paramount Theatre

10/7 - Houston, TX - White Oak Music Hall

10/8 - Dallas, TX - Kessler Theatre

10/10 - Nashville, TN - Exit/In

10/11 - Atlanta, GA - Aisle 5

10/13 - Chapel Hill, NC - Cat's Cradle

10/14 - Baltimore, MD - Baltimore Soundstage

10/15 - Philadelphia, PA - Theatre of Living Arts

10/17 - New York, NY - Irving Plaza

10/19 - Cambridge, MA - The Sinclair

10/20 - Montreal QC - Le National

10/21 - Toronto, ON - The Opera House

10/22 - Detroit, MI - El Club

10/24 - Chicago, IL - Metro

10/25 - St. Paul, MN - Turf Club

10/27 - Denver, CO - Bluebird Theater

10/28 - Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge

10/30 - Seattle, WA - The Showbox

10/31 - Vancouver, BC - Venue Nightclub

11/1 - Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom

11/3 - Sacramento, CA - Ace Of Spades

11/4 - San Francisco, CA - The Regency Ballroom

Chelsea Wolfe images and bio are available HERE

CD / LP Pre-order: http://smarturl.it/CWHissSpun_Store

iTunes: http://smarturl.it/CWHissSpun_iTunes

Spotify: http://smarturl.it/CWHissSpun_Spotify

"What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it." - Henry Miller

Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe's expansive discography-a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller's quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. "I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free," Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. "You're just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fed over and killed for sty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it's been fed for a long time, it's been fed since the beginning. It's overwhelming and I have to write about it."

Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe's latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It's an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe's personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years-the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe's rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend's workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance-bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.

The album opens with the sickening bang of "Spun", where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun-whether it's the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of "16 Psyche", the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on "Vex", or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of "The Culling-all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe's introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with "Particle Flux", an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang-a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of "Offering" serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into "Static Hum", where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe's former bandmate and current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a "burning planet." By the time the album closes with "Scrape", Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.

"The album is cyclical, like me and my moods," Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. "Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force-all with gut feelings as the center of the self." And it's an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. "I'm at odds with myself...

I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way.

I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality." Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

(Sargent House - Sept. 22, 2017)

1. Spun
2. 16 Psyche
3. Vex
4. Strain
5. The Culling
6. Particle Flux
7. Twin Fawn
8. Offering
9. Static Hum

10. Welt

11. Two Spirit

12. Scrape

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