Chelsea Wolfe upends a lot of the standard genre signals in her music. Her latest release, “Hypnos,” opens with spare and spooky acoustic guitar plucking and Wolfe’s haunting and hushed singing. The pace of the music is generally glacial, which adds to the ominous aura. Strings hover atop the other sounds in shrill atonal layers. Swirls of reverb might whip a vocal line into a vortex.
There’s an intense, dark, incantatory, ritualistic element to Wolfe’s music, something akin to Diamanda Galas, P.J. Harvey, Swans, Zola Jesus or Angel Olsen. It explains the fondness that fans of goth and Scandinavian death metal have for Wolfe, even though the propulsive force of her music is more emotional and psychic than overtly sonic.
Much of Wolfe’s material — her lyrics, her imagery, and the texture of her recordings — suggests that we all possess a spiritual black hole, a dangerous region that can pull us toward destruction if we don’t understand its borders. This is murky folk music for people who like to be vaguely scared by a singer.
Wolfe plays the Ballroom at the Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, Thursday, May 12, at 9 p.m. $18 to $20. 203-288-6400, thespacect.com.
