Z Wolf stands at a crossroads on ‘The Red Mirror’

The last year has been a challenging one for Z Wolf, forcing him to navigate everything from the death of a beloved pet to the health struggles of multiple aging family members, including one recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and another with dementia who suffered a stroke. Amid all of this, Wolf again picked up the guitar, reconnecting with the chaotic spirit that first drew him to the instrument decades back.

“It hasn’t been my habit to play guitar. I’m more comfortable on the keyboard and there’s a piano in the house,” Wolf said in late October. “When I was young, especially, the thing that got me excited about music was Nine Inch Nails, because [Trent Reznor] was doing something so different from all of his peers at the time. And that’s really what spoke to me, those crazy noises. And it still does. I love listening to stuff and being like, ‘I have no idea what that is.’ It’s still magical to me all these years later. And there’s something to be said for the immediacy and the visceral reaction a guitar gives you, because you can hear the person’s fingers moving on the frets and the notes bending and it’s just an entirely different beast.”

In exploring the sonic possibilities still present for him in the instrument, songs began to quickly take shape, and in a matter of weeks Wolf had unexpectedly completed enough material for a new solo album, The Red Mirror, which released digitally today (Friday, Oct. 25). 

Both in Damn the Witch Siren, the electro-pop duo he confounded with his partner, Bobbi Kitten, and on more recent solo projects, including Nautilus, an ambient instrumental album released in March, Wolf has leaned more heavily on electronics. The Red Mirror, in contrast, is a more straight-up rock record, built on guitars that conjure everything from the gothic grandeur of the Cure (“Halloween Party”) to the industrial crunch of Nine Inch Nails (“Vampires II (Necropolis)”). 

Lyrically, the record seems to explore the idea of existing at a crossroads, and in listening back I continually found myself drawn to the opening lines of the nearly 10-minute closing track, “Vampires V (The Red Mirror)”: “Time to decide/Will you be/Who you were always meant to be?”

“I’m definitely in a place of uncertainty now,” said Wolf, who along with Kitten has started to plot what might be next for the pair, up to and including a move to a to-be-determined location. (The two have kicked around cities from Los Angeles and New Orleans to Asheville, North Carolina.) “A lot of the subject matter here is life and getting older and the trouble I have with that. … It feels like where I’m at with things right now, where I feel this duality and it’s like, ‘Am I done with that journey? Am I starting a new one?’ I’m just in this transitional period and I feel different than I used to, and in some ways like a stranger to myself.”

This idea is reflected most clearly in “Vampires III (Mulberry Wine),” a shadowy, loosely electronic turn on which Wolf appears to wrestle with this evaporated sense of self. “Lost my faith and I lost my name,” he sings, a few beats later adding, “I am not who I was then.”

It’s only in more recent weeks that Wolf has started to gain a better grip on the myriad ideas with which he was wrestling during the recording of the album, describing the creative process as one over which he has in many ways little control. “When you let music just come out of you, it doesn’t feel like it came from you, exactly,” he said. “I want to be careful talking about that, but yeah, it’s weird. And then a day or a week will go by, and I’ll read back on it and realize what it means. … It’s just very strange, and even all of these years on I don’t understand how any of it works. It’s like magic.”

This magic, in part, is what continues to draw Wolf back to music despite the challenges that have arisen from his long involvement with the form. These include both physical hurdles – Wolf suffers from tinnitus that has kept him from performing in recent years – as well as economic ones, with Wolf and Kitten both innately aware of the challenges faced by anyone trying to carve out a career as a working musician in this post-Covid era. 

“The music world is tough, and again, I don’t want to sound entitled or anything, but we’ve done the math, and it just doesn’t add up,” said Wolf, who in recent years has turned much of his attention to computer animation, which provides a similar sense of creative release along with more favorable long-term job prospects. “Even mid- and upper-tier artists are making posts about how they can’t make it work, and about how touring is next to impossible. It’s just a different world than when I started doing this, so unless you’re completely insane, which I am, you have to step back and ask yourself, ‘How do I want to be spending my time and is it going to be worth it in the long run?’ And I don’t even want to say ‘worth it,’ because I find music so rewarding, but at the same time I have nothing for retirement, you know? So, what am I going to do?”

From the onset, Wolf has never written and recorded with a larger audience in mind – “We’ve never made music thinking about what will make people like us or follow us or call this ‘Witch Siren summer’ or something,” he said, and laughed – and this idea has only become more deeply ingrained with the passage of time.

“As someone who would love to have a career in music, I just keep shooting myself in the foot. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll make a two-hour ambient album that no one will listen to, and then I’ll make an album of instrumental piano music that no one will listen to,’” he said. “But those are the things that are speaking to me at the time, so you just have to let yourself follow that muse.”