I Inside the Old Year Dying
Like it did for listeners, Polly Jean Harvey’s 10th album came to her by surprise. “I\'d come off tour after \[2016’s\] *Hope Six Demolition Project*, and I was taking some time where I was just reassessing everything,” she tells Apple Music of what would become a seven-year break between records, during which it was rumored the iconic singer-songwriter might retire altogether. “Maybe something that we all do in our early fifties, but I\'d really wanted to see if I still felt I was doing the best that I could be with my life. Not wanting to sound doom-laden, but at 50, you do start thinking about a finite amount of time and maximizing what you do with that. I wanted to see what arose in me, see where I felt I needed to go with this last chapter of my life.” Harvey turned her attention to soundtrack work and poetry. In 2022, she published *Orlam*, a magical realist novel-in-verse set in the western English countryside where she grew up, written in a rare regional dialect. To stay sharp, she’d make time to practice scales on piano and guitar, to dig into theory. “Then I just started,” she says. “Melodies would arise, and instead of making up vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I\'d just pull at some of the poems. I wasn\'t trying to write a song, but then I had all these poems everywhere, overflowing out of my brain and on tables everywhere, bits of paper and drawings. Everything got mixed up together.” Written over the course of three weeks—one song a day—*I Inside the Old Year Dying* combines Harvey’s latest disciplines, lacing 12 of *Orlam*’s poems through similarly dreamy and atmospheric backdrops. The language is obscure but evocative, the arrangements (longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish produced) often vaporous and spare. But the feeling in her voice (especially on the title track and opener “Prayer at the Gate”) is inescapable. “I stopped thinking about songs in terms of traditional song structure or having to meet certain expectations, and I viewed them like I do the freedom of soundtrack work—it was just to create the right emotional underscore to the scene,” she says. “It was almost like the songs were just there, really wanting to come out. It fell out of me very easily. I felt a lot freer as a writer—from this album and hopefully onwards from now.”
In songs adapted from her book-length poem Orlam, the British singer-songwriter crafts a hallucinatory dreamworld out of folk instruments, primitive electronics, and warped field recordings.
Sonically I Inside The Old Year Dying is PJ Harvey’s loosest work. With her frequent collaborators John Parish and Flood she uses largely loose, softly distorted guitar playing and gentle drum patterns that carry an improvisational feel, but never…
The Dorset-born musician's first album since 2016 is both elusive and mesmerising. Read the NME review of PJ Harvey's new album.
This is a wonderfully immersive experience, the music stripped back to a skeletal state that recalls Nick Cave’s recent work
It’ll likely take some time to fully unravel, but on the surface this looks like a daring return.
On Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project, PJ Harvey documented troubled times in the world; on I Inside the Old Year Dying, she presents a spellbinding world of her own.
With I Inside the Old Year Dying, PJ Harvey has produced her most beguiling work yet.
PJ Harvey beats boredom by crafting something wholly unique on I Inside The Old Year Dying.
For her first album since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, PJ Harvey has turned her attention from rundown public housing in the United States to matters a little closer to her home.
Over thirty years since her barnstorming debut 'Dry' shook up the music world; it's a blessing to see PJ Harvey still making fiercely independent music on
The singer-songwriter’s 10th album, based on her 2022 verse novel, isn’t her most accessible, but there are standout moments
The music on ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ rattles and quakes in stark contrast with Harvey’s studiously composed intellectual exercises.
PJ Harvey - "I Inside The Old Year Dying" album review for Northern Transmissions by Zara Hedderman. The album is out July 7th.
Enigmatic and occasionally disturbing, the songwriter adapts her own book of poetry into a rough-edged LP full of potency and atmosphere
PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying review: So look behind, look before, life knocking at death’s door
PJ Harvey delights in magical realism for her first album in seven years; Nick Drake’s songcraft is honoured with a beautiful covers record
An album littered with reflective but dialectically odd lyrics balanced by a natural leaning towards strong melodies