The dark, gothed-out singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe tends to vacillate between spare, haunted doom-folk and heavier forms of music. Last year, she released her spartan album Birth Of Violence. Last month, she turned up on an all-star metal cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” And today, Wolfe announces that she and her friend and collaborator Jess Gowrie have a new project together. They’ve given it a great name: Mrs. Piss.
Gowrie, also of the Sacramento sludge band Horseneck, is Wolfe’s drummer. In Mrs. Piss, Wolfe sings and plays guitar, while Gowrie plays drums, guitar, and bass, and does the programming. Together, they make a grandly grungy noise — something bigger and more anthemic than what we’re used to hearing from Wolfe.
Mrs. Piss will released their debut album Self-Surgery later this month, and they’ve just shared its first two singles. “Knelt” is a titanic churn, an industrial doom headbanger that never eases out of its slow and colossal groove. “Downer Surrounded By Uppers” rips a little harder; it’s an ugly riff-monster that captures some of the scuzzy propulsion of ’90s noise-rock. Both songs are elevated by Wolfe’s craggy, vulnerable vocals, and both have flickering, atmospheric black-and-white videos. Below, check out both songs, as well as the Self-Surgery tracklist and the things that Wolfe and Gowrie have to say about the project.
In a press release, Wolfe says:
Working on this project brought Jess and I so much closer as songwriters and production partners, after reuniting as friends and bandmates. It was freeing and fun to channel some wild energies that I don’t typically put into my own music. We tried not to overthink the songs as we were writing them, but at the same time we did consciously put a lot into crafting them into our own weird sonic vision. This project was a chance for us to do things our own way, on our own terms, and we plan to invite more womxn musicians along for future Mrs. Piss recordings.
Meanwhile, Gowrie says:
To me, Mrs. Piss represents a musical chemistry cut short long ago that now gets a second chance. Creating with Chelsea has always been very liberating for me, and we both push each other to try new things: anything and everything. Both of us have grown so much as writers and musicians since our first band together (Red Host), and with the journeys we had to take separately to get there, we both have so much more to say; so much more pain and anger to express. That said, we also had a lot of fun doing it, not to mention how freeing it is to not give a fuck and to just create.
TRACKLIST:
01 “To Crawl Inside”
02 “Downer Surrounded By Uppers”
03 “Knelt”
04 “Nobody Wants To Party With Us”
05 “M.B.O.T.W.O.”
06 “You Took Everything”
07 “Self-Surgery”
08 “Mrs. Piss”
Self-Surgery is out 5/29 on Sargent House.
