When I think about the difficulty I’m having listening to Wolf, I remind myself that there are dozens, hundreds of albums that inflict similar psychic pain on people because of their race or gender or experience that I’d never notice on my first or tenth listen. Everyone’s flashpoints are different, whether they’re homophobic slurs or racial epithets or sweeping, harmful generalizations about a genre or culture or all three. As a critic and person, confronting such a flashpoint is an eye-opening, educative experience, and for that I suppose I’m thankful for Wolf, even if I might never actually hear the album.