PJ Harvey - I Inside The Old Year Dying

Extended pauses between albums are par for the course for PJ Harvey nowadays, but there’s still the sense that genuine recalibration was needed during this latest eight-year layoff. ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’ was a peculiar thing, and seems even stranger now when viewed through the prism of ‘A Dog Called Money’, the making-of documentary that followed in 2019. She travelled to Sarajevo, Afghanistan, the housing projects of Washington D.C. She saw inequality up close and howled against it in the sound of her last album, all angry brass swells and strident vocal delivery. Her lyrics, though, didn’t match, being as they were scattered, diffuse, lacking a clear target. In the years since, PJ has focused more closely on her words, with Orlam, a collection of gorgeously weird poetic meditations, surfacing last Autumn. Thematically, this new LP - her tenth - makes a point of adapting them for song, resulting in what feels like a loose concept album thin on literalism but rich on eerie embraces of old English folklore, with the action - if you can call it that - largely focused on what secrets the Dorset woods she grew up in the shadow of might be keeping. The music follows suit. It is wispy and scratchy and unsettling, and beautiful at the same time. Atmospherically, it’s a return to the ghostly uneasiness of ‘White Chalk’ and ‘Let England Shake’, but sonically it’s new territory entirely, a lush blend of acoustic guitar and twinkly synthesisers that feels, at times, as inscrutable as her words. ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ will likely take some time to fully unravel, but on the surface, it looks like a daring return.