On her eighth album, 2024’s She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, Chelsea Wolfe recruited TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek for a largely electronic exploration of her recent sobriety. For its follow-up, The Dark (a title California’s reigning goth-folk maven had somehow not used before), the singer-songwriter found herself drawn back to a slow-burning rock sound. With producer Jennifer Decilveo and long-time collaborator Ben Chisholm, Wolfe built the songs of her ninth album from bare-bones acoustic guitar and piano sketches that occasionally evolve into epic goth-rock rippers. (See “Seethe”, a slice of driving ’80s rock, or the head-banging “Swallower”, with its howling vocals and a solo from Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen.) Elsewhere, Wolfe embraces a classically Californian folk sound with her own doomy twist: Evanescence meets Ultraviolence-era Lana on “Halo”, while “Death Is Not the End”, a mostly acoustic meditation on the afterlife until Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck unleashes a massive doom-metal outro. And on the title track, she honours the comforts of darkness—a fertile, earthy darkness in the deep woods where seeds can grow.