When we caught up with Chelsea Wolfe recently, we discussed the liminal – an in-between place, a place of uncertainty, but a place she tells us she is comfortable with and guided her in creating her latest album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She.

It’s fitting for an artist like Wolfe to be at peace with occupying uncertain territory. Musically speaking, at least, she’s always been an in-between artist. Her work has always fallen somewhere in between beauty and brutality, catharsis and theatricality, light and dark. She’s never been one to settle on one style, either. Folk, electronica, alternative rock and metal sounds have all equally informed her gothic flavoured output.

Given the self-effacing tone of She Reaches Out, and the circumstances that birthed it (lockdown, sobriety, toxic relationships), it’s also fitting that an intimate setting such as The Button Factory would be the venue for Wolfe’s emotional display.

Wolfe and her band of unmerry men took the stage undercover of deep blue lighting to play to a crowd who looked much like them – matured, subdued and head to toe in black. She Reaches Out would dominate the set for the evening, providing 10 of the 16 songs she would play. Wolfe cut a ghoulish figure on stage, shrouded in a black flowing frock and her face obscured by strands of hair, rarely if ever highlighted throughout her performance.

As sonically impressive and lyrically confessional as the album is, their potential live impact at the earliest moments were hamstrung by unfortunate mixing. The doomy atmospherics and mesmerising vocals that made tracks like ‘Whispers In The Echo Chamber’, ‘Everything Turns Blue’, ‘House Of Self-Undoing’ ‘Tunnel Lights’ sound so good the first time around just didn’t carry the same force in this setting.

This would however be remedied when Wolfe picked up her guitar for ‘16 Psyche’ and ‘The Culling’ from her 2018 album Hiss Spun, the emotional weight of her words emboldened by the heft of her doom-laden riffs. This portion of the show would demonstrate Wolfe’s ability to captivate audiences by all sorts of means, whether it be the industrial tinged ‘After The Fall’, or the simple yet hauntingly beautiful ‘Flatlands’. Whether toting a Gretsch Broadkaster or a Gibson dreadnought, her audience were eerily silent in reverence.

Wolfe would cap the night off with another run of tracks from her latest album, including a phenomenal rendition of the lead single ‘Dusk’, bookending the performance with fan-favourite ‘Feral Love’. One would think that an artist as unconventional as Wolfe would not play the traditional game of peekaboo, but she would re-emerge from the shadows to burn through ‘Carrion Flowers’, the closest thing she’s ever had to a commercial hit, before ultimately ending the night with a solo acoustic version of ‘The Liminal’, a surefire inclusion for the Unbound EP, and drifting back into the darkness.

It was a fitting end to the evening. Wolfe’s She Reaches Out triptych celebrates the excitement that the unknown can bring. If this is what liminal spaces sound like, then they’re surely a good place to be.