PJ Harvey has released her first single A Child's Question, August of her upcoming album I Inside The Old Year Dying. In a career that can often seem one long radical departure, it may be hard to imagine how PJ Harvey might still surprise. I Inside The Old Year Dying answers that question from its opening bars. After the large-scale, future-facing, often raucous anthems of The Hope Six Demolition Project, it might not be unexpected that Harvey’s song-writing would take a more inward direction. Few, though, will have anticipated so minimalist a turn, and into quite so eerie a landscape: indeed it takes the eye a moment to adjust to the light, and the ear to the silence.
Such an intimate tone would have been impossible to achieve without Harvey contracting her band to her most trusted, long-term musical associates: Flood and John Parish. The pared-down-to-the-bone instrumentation actively clears a space for itself: first impressions are of an impromptu gig for an audience primarily composed of ghosts and trees. For all the polish of the final results, each song seems to have the unity of a single-cell organism, more grown than written: no surprise, then, to discover that I Inside was recorded live in a single room, with the songs often beginning as collective improvisations between Polly, John, Flood and Cecil with his cut-up and treated field recordings, all ably captured by Rob Kirwan, who previously recorded both Hope Six and Let England Shake.
Hope Six saw Harvey’s lyrics draw closer to poetry; here, the two have more-or-less fused. (The album’s themes and symbols mark it as a first cousin to Harvey’s 2022 poetry collection, Orlam.) The words – infused with the dialect of Harvey’s own Dorset childhood – invoke a sort of between-worlds shadowland, a place poised on several thresholds: child and adult, home and forest, day and night, dream and waking, natural and man-made, and the tipping point between seasons.
Harvey’s voice has become, if anything, a more intensely pure instrument over the years. Here it’s sometimes forthright, sometimes almost singing to itself; it’s also wonderfully complimented by the deliberate use of old tech, in the form of the warm, furry circuits of 70s synthesisers. The effect is to provoke both anticipation and nostalgia: the clarity of the child’s voice, as it faces the prospect of adult life, is often drenched in the analogue distortions of history and memory.
It seems odd that such a deliberately self-haunted, secret space of an album offers the listener such a place of refuge and asylum. But that would be to underestimate the straightforward generosity of Harvey as a melodist: I Inside The Old Year Dying is, in the most straightforward sense, a timeless performance. And given the state of the times, the opportunity to stop the clock for the length of these twelve tracks couldn’t have been more welcome.
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