LA singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe mostly writes about things outside of herself. Her music creates huge gothic soundscapes, utilising hazy vocals and distorted guitars to build an atmosphere that is at times disturbing, uncomfortable and little overwhelming.

The result is a powerfully morose exploration of dark themes, but don’t assume the songs are all about her. She “made a conscious decision” to write about things outside of herself “a long time ago”, and she’s sticking to it.

Or so she tells GoldenPlec when we sit down with her for a chat right before her recent Button Factory gig.

But ‘Abyss’ – the drone-metal-art-folk musician’s fifth (and possibly best) album – is at least partially inspired by Wolfe’s own experience of sleep paralysis – a disturbing state between waking and sleeping where a person experiences an inability to move, often while experiencing auditory or visual hallucinations.

The experience of this had informed the sound of Wolfe’s music for years, but ‘Abyss’ saw Wolfe confront the subject more directly. “I'd been writing about it unconsciously for so many years,” Wolfe explains, “and my friend Brian [Cook] from Russian Circles helped me realise it. When he was putting the bio for ’Abyss’ together, we were talking about some notes I’d written while writing the album, and things that I’d been researching, and I realised that this was the first time that I’d really confronted [sleep paralysis] head on and actually put it into songs purposely instead of just unconsciously.”

A lot of the preparatory work for ‘Abyss’ involved Wolfe “reading books about sleep and dreams and trying to figure out more like what it was that was happening to me. It was kind of the first time, maybe a year and a half ago, that I even new that there was a term sleep paralysis and that it was a thing that other people experienced.”

Even when she wasn’t responding directly to it, Wolfe’s experience of sleep paralysis “influenced my sense of reality. Because I’ve struggled with nightmares since I was a little kid… that that's just my view on reality now..."

“Am I awake or am I dreaming right now?” she asks. “It's a little confusing and a little hazy, and that's really what my music has become as well.”

And in this way, “things from my personal life end up in there, whether it’s just like a line like...”

“…you know, I don't really like to say which lines are personal just cos I like to keep my musical life and my personal life separate.”

Instead, Wolfe tells us about how she’s drawn to characters. “Ordinary people can be characters,” she says. “Just people that stand out in a world that's dull and ordinary most of the time, and kinda fucked up the rest of the time. So when someone stands out to me, I usually just end up writing a sort of story about them. And it’s not always completely fact, it usually takes an element of something and turns it into this alternate story or give it alternate ending or something. I like to give dark stories a more hopeful ending sometimes. It's kind of a coping mechanism I think, but it's also something I enjoy doing.”

So it's a process of fictionalising in order to tell a true to life story?

“Yeah. I mean, I think of myself as a storyteller and I like to base things in reality, but it always has this dreamy fictional element to it as well, something fantastical maybe.”

When it came to crafting an album about sleep and dreams and nightmares and the state between waking and dreaming, Wolfe embraced a heavier, more industrial sound than previous records. Wolfe recalls battling with producer John Congleton (Swans, St. Vincent) over the mix, as Wolfe “paid attention to every little sound” while Congleton wanted “to leave more rough edges.” But Wolfe is able to laugh about it now, and praises Congleton’s help in realising an album that was “more rough and raw and vulnerable.” Exactly what she wanted, in other words.

On the instrumental side of things, ‘Abyss’ owes a lot to Wolfe’s growing experience of playing live. “This one is really guitar heavy,” she says, “because we'd been touring a lot with heavier bands... Russian Circles and Queens of the Stone Age and True Widow.”

After seeing these heavy rock shows and how much fun they were having, “We wanted that too.”

Wolfe goes on to explain how she likes to be “surrounded by sound and atmospheres and guitars… I think of it as comforting thing. Like the heaviness and the loudness is something you can escape inside of.”

But ‘Abyss’ isn’t all about the huge wall of sound that crashes into the listener on goth-anthem Carrion Flower that opens that album. Equally important are the dynamics – a deep breath of more minimal, acoustic elements in between all the heaviness. Iron Moon goes from “really dramatically quiet to really dramatically loud, and that is supposed to represent that state of being stuck in between [waking and dreaming]” Wolfe explains.

For many years, Wolfe wasn’t the biggest fan of playing live either. She preferred the recording process (“where you can totally be yourself… You can just create and feel totally free”), but felt uncomfortable taking to the stage, in front of people.

“Being the centre of attention isn’t my favourite state of being,” she explains. But in recent times “I think that've been able to come to a place where it's really about the music, and my band, and the sound, and it's not about me, so I feel much more comfortable.”

In fact, on this tour the new tracks have taken on a real life of their own, so Wolfe has even “started to enjoy that” as well.

“I really wanna do a live album with the ‘Abyss’ songs,” she says. “Because I feel like they've changed so much already just in the three months we've been playing them live.”

This probably means we can expect to hear more from Chelsea Wolfe soon.