Chelsea Wolfe. Photo by Erbu Yildiz.
Chelsea Wolfe has released “Tunnel Lights,” the third single from her upcoming album She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She due out February 9 on Loma Vista. Following “Dusk” and “Whispers in the Echo Chamber,” Wolfe’s newest drop only dives deeper into her aesthetic of the dark divine.
Paired against breathy vocals at once angelic and ghostly, the dense electronic clash of “Tunnel Lights” comes as the latest progression of Wolfe’s increasing interest in avant-garde and industrial rock. Her previous work includes seven albums that span doom metal to acoustic folk.
In collaboration with director George Gallardo Kattah, the “Tunnel Lights” video dwells in the mystic gloom of the Colombian páramo, embracing aridity, desolation, and endless fog as visual matches to the song’s daunting industrial crush and raw vocals. Wolfe appears like an apparition between landscape shots to deliver cypher-esque lyrics that are by now a staple of her oeuvre: “Let it suffer, let it shine / What must be severed, left behind?”
As Wolfe puts it, “Tunnel Lights” is about “actually living instead of just ‘getting by.’ It’s about waking up to the fact that you’ve been languishing in the dark and it’s time to start taking steps towards the lights that’ll guide you out of the tunnel-cave.”
The release of “Tunnel Lights” cements Wolfe’s work in a self-imposed limbo between all things haunting and beautiful, tenacious and soft, uncomfortable and, despite it all, entirely irresistible.
