Chelsea Joy Wolfe (born November 14, 1983) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. Her work blends elements of gothic rock, doom metal, and folk.

Growing up in Northern California with a country musician father, Wolfe began writing and recording songs during her childhood. She began to earn recognition for her albums The Grime and the Glow (2010) and Apokalypsis (2011), which blended gothic and folk elements. In her next few albums Pain Is Beauty (2013), Abyss (2015) and Hiss Spun (2017) Wolfe incorporated elements of neofolk, electronic music and heavy metal. Her evolution continued with Birth of Violence (2019) and She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She (2024).

In addition to her solo career, she has collaborated with the band Converge on the album Bloodmoon: I (2021) and composer Tyler Bates on the soundtrack to the 2022 film X. She has also featured on songs by artists including Russian Circles, Deafheaven, Myrkur and Xiu Xiu.

Wolfe was born in Roseville, California, near Sacramento, and raised in both towns. She is of English, Norwegian, Swedish, and German descent. Her father was in a country band and owned a home studio. Wolfe lived with her grandmother during a part of her childhood, who taught her about aromatherapy, Reiki and "other realms".

By the age of 7, she had written her first poem, and by the age of 9, had written and recorded songs which she later described as "basically Casio-based gothy R&B songs".

Of her childhood, Wolfe said, "I grew up pretty fast. I had older sisters. By the time I was 11, I was drinking 40s." She struggled with sleep paralysis as a child and through her teens, which landed her in the hospital for sleep studies; these experiences eventually became material for her albums Abyss and Hiss Spun.

In 2006, Wolfe composed an album, titled Mistake in Parting, which was never officially released. Of the album, Wolfe said: "I was 21 years old and wrote a shitty singer-songwriter breakup album. I didn't even really want to be a musician back then, but a lot of my friends were like 'let's do this, I've got some producer friends' and they helped me make this over-produced, terrible record... I sort of took a break from music for a while since I wasn't happy with what I was making". Wolfe later commented that she scrapped the album largely because it had been written about events in her personal life: "I was writing really personal stuff about my own life, and I didn't feel comfortable at all... I didn't want [my music] to be so much about myself, and I just had to find a new perspective".

Wolfe's first widely released album, The Grime and the Glow (2010), was issued on New York-based independent label Pendu Sound Recordings, preceded that same year by the limited-edition albums Soundtrack VHS/Gold and Soundtrack VHS II. Her 2010 cover of Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction" helped her receive her first exposure after it was highlighted in a notable blog. Her next album, Apokalypsis (2011), stylized as Ἀποκάλυψις, gained her an underground following, as well as critical acclaim, receiving favorable reviews in Pitchfork and CMJ. Wolfe toured extensively in North America and Europe to support both albums, and suffered from extreme stage fright; when she initially began performing live, Wolfe would wear a black veil over her face. "Performing was something that I had to learn," she said. "I could barely handle being onstage for the first few years, and it's the reason it took me so long to start my career as a musician".