Alternative
Loma Vista Recordings · 21 August 2026
The most telling fact about The Dark is how long the songs are. All ten fit between the 3:17 of “Seethe” and the 4:31 of “Cold”, and the album runs forty and a half minutes. On Hiss Spun (2017) the spread went from one minute fourteen to six minutes seven: there the songs lasted what they needed to, and here they all last the same.
It’s Chelsea Wolfe’s ninth album and her first since She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She (2024), which Dave Sitek produced with the electronics well forward. This one is signed by Ben Chisholm, back again, and by Jennifer Decilveo (Hozier, Bat for Lashes), new to the fold. The session band is top-drawer: Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, Matt Chamberlain on drums and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck.
With those names in the room the sound is hard to account for. Electric guitar barely registers, the drums come across dry and muffled, and Wolfe’s voice sits a hand’s width above the backing when her way of singing asks for the opposite: that whispered tone needs air around it to frighten anyone. Here it has none.
The songs are there. “Turn the Key” and “Death Is Not the End”, one of the two singles trailed on 23 June, carry real tension and get somewhere; “Halo” and “Swallower” hold up. The trouble is the sum: ten tracks at the same mid tempo, with the same dynamic range and the same length, make the record play flat even when the individual songs don’t.
Wolfe came out of folk and keeps going back to it; what comes back here is the production, rounding off what should have stayed rough. Forty and a half minutes, ten tracks, not one of them past five.
Rating: 6/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre