REVIEW: PJ Harvey releases first album in seven years, 'I Inside the Old Year Dying'

Words: Emma Driver
Image: Steve Gullick

Trying to sum up PJ Harvey’s latest album is like trying to catch rainwater with your toes: it’s futile, and why would you even try? In her long and varied musical career, the English singer, musician, poet and composer has always slipped in and out of genres, atmospheres and art forms. She’s the two-time Mercury Prize-winning maker of visceral, bluesy, alt-rock ’90s albums like To Bring You My Love and Rid of Me; a saxophonist who got her start in English folk bands; a composer for theatre, film and TV; and a poet with two published works, including last year’s verse-novel Orlam.

I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey’s first new solo album since 2016, is one for immersion, not a casual listen. It takes language and ideas from her Orlam poems – which she wrote in the dialect of her home county, Dorset – and turns them into songs full of dense forests and ghosts and a creeping sense of loss. Harvey and her longtime collaborators, multi-instrumentalist John Parish and producer Flood, pull these poem snippets into eerie and often sorrowful musical shapes, with few repeated choruses or refrains. Instead, the songs flow in an entrancing, earthy, eerie-folk way, suggesting seasons and cycles, endings and beginnings.

Lead single ‘A Child’s Question, August’ opens with a gently drummed rhythm and a stretched, reverby guitar. Harvey’s high, fragile vocal enters: “Starling swarms will soon be lorn / Rooks tell stories across the corn”. This is not quite the world we know, and yet its features are familiar: birds, crops, flight. Actor Ben Whishaw intones low notes on the song’s repeated lines, anchoring Harvey’s airlifting vocals. “Death of summer, death of play”, she sings, and a sense of loss – of summer and of innocence – is palpable.

Mixing analogue and electronic textures, Harvey and her collaborators play and loop and distort their instruments and samples, while drums pulse like heartbeats. Sounds and field recordings that Harvey has collected – birds, children, animals, leaves in the wind – are largely unrecognisable in the background but at times cut through (‘We got a bass out of a cow mooing’, producer Flood told BBC Radio 6). That textural strangeness is a product of their trust between Harvey, Parish and Flood, and their experimental approach in the studio. “We don’t feel embarrassed to try anything,” Harvey told the BBC.

Second single, ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’, almost has a chorus – the repeated “Oh Wyman, oh Wyman”, invoking the ghost of a dead soldier called Wyman/Elvis who features in the Orlam poems. It’s more accessible to the pop-tuned ear, and entrancing too, with wistful acoustic guitar, and vocal textures from actor Colin Morgan (Merlin, Humans). ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ (another Elvis reference) is a song of deep yearning, yet Harvey’s evocatively shaky fingerpicking and a brushed snare drum provide a lighter texture as the contemporary world comes knocking: “In her satchel, Pepsi fizz / Peanut-and-banana sandwiches / For this man her shepherd is … My love, will you come back again?”

Sampled children’s voices feature in ‘Autumn Term’ and accentuate the dread of returning to school after the summer: “I ascend three steps to hell / The school bus heaves up the hill”. There’s a sense of foreboding in the wobbly, high-pitched vocal lines and scratchy acoustic guitar, as if this is the taunting of wicked fairies. ‘All Souls’, at the other end of the album’s sound spectrum, begins with almost a minute of distorted electronic pulse. Harvey’s plaintive lyric begins, the pulse expands, electric guitar and percussion add drama, then it ends on a hopeful note: there is loss, but the ghost may yet return.

‘A Child’s Question, July’ and title track ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ are built on rollicking folksy rhythms, while ‘The Nether-edge’ has a melody that is almost Toris Amos-like in its angles. Album closer ‘A Noiseless Noise’ is as wilfully contradictory as its title. After opening with minimal vocal and a guitar that wouldn’t be amiss in ’90s Radiohead, a cacophony of drums, sharp feedback and defiant vocals starts up; these give way to gentleness again, and a tender “Go home now, love”. Home, it seems, is where all the clamour of life can be distilled into a more peaceful brew.

Harvey has also said that she hates repeating herself, and rarely admits to any autobiographical content in her songs. Both of those approaches are embodied in I Inside the Old Year Dying: it’s almost impossible to trap within a genre, and any autobiography is well and truly buried in the bedrock of another world. Life is a series of goodbyes, these songs seem to say – to childhood, to ghosts, to people we love, to our own ways of seeing – and that is a feeling to sink into. If there’s no dirt under your fingernails, then you haven’t dug deep enough.

I Inside the Old Year Dying is out now via Partisan Records. You can buy and stream here.
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