Chelsea Wolfe – Powerstation, 30 May 2025: Review & Photo Gallery

31st May 2025

Chelsea Wolfe at the Powerstation. Gothic hymns in a haze of smoke and static.

A fog descended on Auckland Friday night, both literal and metaphorical, as Chelsea Wolfe made her long-awaited return to our shores.

But before the goth priestess took the altar, the congregation was treated to a surreal sermon from Aphir, the genre-blending opener who nearly electrocuted herself into legend.

Wearing jet-black fishnet tights and a face full of fearless intent, Aphir didn’t so much open the night as detonate it.

She wrangled keys, beat pads, and electronic wizardry into sprawling, chaotic soundscapes that felt like Nine Inch Nails doing tai chi inside a haunted rave.

With her body flinging between poised, almost trance-like stances and frantic, hyper-manic dance bursts—think rag doll meets drum machine—Aphir captivated a modest but enthusiastic crowd.

In one particularly bizarre moment, she paused to recount how she’d nearly qualified for a Darwin Award after brushing live wires.

This next song is about feeling 240 volts surge through your body, she said, like a dark comic come back from the brink. That electric moment, both literally and metaphorically, summed up the bravery and abandon of her set. Dangerous, jarring, and impossible to ignore.

Then came the slow, ghostly dismantling of her gear—digital organs being rolled away, pads stashed like contraband—until the air stilled for Wolfe.

Chelsea Wolfe entered like an apparition, cloaked in haze and gloom, greeted by a sea of mostly black-clad disciples. Goths, doom-heads, and genre-agnostic fans alike, numbering no more than 300.

Intimate. Almost sacred. But as with many of Wolfe’s records, tonight’s performance was part religious rite, part beautiful collapse.

The atmosphere? Ethereal and oppressive in equal measure. Wolfe’s signature mix of drone, doom, and Folk noir swirled in a constant fog of stage smoke so thick the band looked embalmed in gauze. But somewhere inside that veil, something was slightly…off.

By the second song, a rogue click track was clearly audible, an oddity rarely heard in shows of this calibre. It seemed to distract rather than guide.

Even stranger, her drummer (competent, but far from transcendent) leaned so heavily on a backing track that she skipped live snare hits entirely. It seemed the snares were already pre-programmed into the mix.

The crowd swayed, hypnotised, as the music wrapped itself around their consciousness. Heavy guitar pulses thrumming like a heartbeat, equal parts soothing and unsettling.

It wasn’t just sound, it was sensation. A slow, beautiful chaos that pulled you under and refused to let go.

Wolfe, ever the enigma, kept the talking to a minimum. Not one for banter or pretence, she let the music speak volumes. That’s the mystique she wears like armour and it works.

But midway through the set, she broke her silence just long enough to offer a flicker of warmth.
It’s very nice to be back, she said softly, barely above the reverb. This one goes out to my friend Amber. This one’s called ‘Dust.’

And with that, she vanished once more into the ether of distortion and shadow—her voice, her presence, her entire being folded back into the storm she commands so effortlessly.

At one point, Wolfe halted a track mid-flow, brushing it off with a sleepy, self-aware quip. We’re gonna start that one over, I didn’t get much sleep.

It was an oddly human moment in a set otherwise steeped in gothic grandeur, a brief peek behind the veil of doom.

But the music—when it hit—was haunting. Wolfe’s vocals, as ever, were divine and doomed.

Her voice floated just above the guitar-heavy churn, like a ghost wailing over war drums. Even as technical hiccups and backing-track-heavy arrangements chipped away at the spell, the mood remained immersive, gothic in the truest sense. Bleak, beautiful, and slightly terrifying.

Still, one couldn’t ignore the sense that the Powerstation was caught between an intimate art performance and a half-sleepwalking run-through.

With Wolfe’s increasingly studio-dependent live show, the magic sometimes felt just out of reach—smothered, perhaps, under too many layers of smoke and MIDI automation.

With fog machines blasting all night, the band looked one breath away from glycol poisoning. Doom never smelled so synthetic.

But that’s the strange paradox of Chelsea Wolfe. She thrives in discomfort. She crafts beauty from rot, romance from decay. Even when the gears show through, she remains compelling. Less a performer and more a sonic medium channelling the darkness between worlds.

Chelsea Wolfe Setlist Highlights:

Whispers in The Echo Chamber (ghostly opener that set the tone)
Flatlands (heartbreaker bathed in mist)
16 Psyche (delivers the night’s peak intensity)

More séance than show, with moments of brilliance muffled under the weight of backing tracks and too much smoke. Still, when Chelsea Wolfe’s voice pierced through the fog, it reminded us why we came. To get lost in the dark.

Paul Marshall