Pic Credit – Steve Gullick
PJ HARVEY has released a second song, the title track, from her forthcoming album ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’. Today’s song release is accompanied by an animated music video, directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña.
Video can be viewed here
Of the new single “I Inside the Old I Dying”, PJ Harvey says:
“This delicate and beautiful song eluded us until the very last day in the studio. Over the previous five weeks we had tried so many times to capture it and failed, and/but then John reinvented the feel of the guitar pattern. As he was demonstrating it in the control room, Flood handed me a microphone and pressed record whilst I sat next to John trying to work out how to sing to it. The result somehow captures the ethereal and melancholic longing I was looking for.
In the lyric everyone is waiting for the savior to reappear – everyone and everything anticipates the arrival of this figure of love and transformation.
There is a sense of sexual longing and awakening and of moving from one realm into another – from child to adult, from life to death and the eternal.”
The film’s directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña say:
“We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection. We imagined that the video can be seen as a little fairy tale and also as an intimate ritual. We wanted to keep the animation in a state of scenic and material rawness, as if the elements we see are not characters or props, but artifacts and talismans that are part of a ceremony.”
The forthcoming album, ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ – Harvey’s first since 2016’s Grammy-nominated ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’ – will be released on 7th July via Partisan Records. This highly anticipated release is produced by long-time collaborators Flood and John Parish.
Harvey has commanded attention since the start of her career and is the only musician to have been awarded the UK’s Mercury Music Prize more than once, winning first in 2001 for ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’ and again in 2011 for ‘Let England Shake’. An accomplished poet and visual artist, as well as a musician and songwriter, her work is striking in its originality: vivid, absorbing, and distinct. Since the release of ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’, which went to #1 album in her native UK, she has contributed compositions for stage and screen; most recently for Sharon Horgan’s acclaimed ‘Bad Sisters’ mini-series.
Harvey first announced ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ with the release of a first single – “A Child’s Question, August” – at the end of April. The album’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realization that was troubling beyond words.
The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London – lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.
“The studio was set up for live play, and that’s all we did,” she says. The importance of this is hard to overstate: if ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.
To coincide with this second song release, Harvey has also announced a run of tour dates in the UK and Europe – beginning in late September with shows in Glasgow, London and Manchester before touring throughout continental Europe. UK dates are as follows:
PJ HARVEY – 2023 UK TOUR DATES
25th September – Barrowland, Glasgow, UK
26th September – Barrowland, Glasgow, UK
28th September – Roundhouse, London, UK
29th September – Roundhouse, London, UK
2nd October – Albert Hall, Manchester, UK
3rd October – Albert Hall, Manchester, UK
Tickets go on general sale on Friday 16th June. For more information, please visit: www.pjharvey.net
