PJ Harvey – ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ review: immersive return from modern master

5 July, 2023

PJ Harvey

It’s been a long, seven-year wait for PJ Harvey’s new album. Her last, ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’, took a toll. Travelling to areas destroyed by war and poverty, it was a powerful, but emotionally draining, record to make. “I wasn’t sure… if I wanted to carry on writing albums or playing, or if it was time for a change in my life,” the musician reflected recently, adding she was “heartbroken” that she’d lost her connection to music.

During the ensuing period, Harvey instead turned to poetry, soundtracks and scores via some mentoring from poet Don Paterson and some sage advice from filmmaker Steve McQueen, the latter who advised her to find a way to combine her love of words, images and music that went beyond the traditional album format she was now struggling to create within. ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ was born out of her last poetry book, 2022’s Orlam, and is effectively a collection of twelve poems set to music – and Harvey has never sounded freer.

The album follows the life of a young girl, Ira-Abel Rawles, as she navigates a thorny path from childhood to adolescence. It’s set within an ever-changing landscape – like the one Harvey came from, and still inhabits, today – and it sounds like it’s from another era thanks to Harvey enunciating in dense, archaic Dorset dialect. Words like “drisk”, “drush” and “gawley” roll lushly from Harvey’s tongue, while field recordings of the surrounding countryside make it feel like Harvey’s most immersive album yet.

Standout ‘Autumn Term’ sees a young Rawles dread another day at school. “I ascend three steps to hell. The school bus heaves up the hill,” Harvey sings in an almost unrecognisable high-pitched register as sounds of children echo in the background. Like many songs set in autumn and winter on the album, it’s musically sparse – a lone piano here, a quiet guitar there.

Harvey’s career has been characterised by continual Bowie-like reinvention and this is one her biggest about-turns both structurally and musically. Harvey’s voice, which is the biggest instrument on the album, inhabits either eerie whispers or uncanny falsettos thanks to some experimental live production techniques from co-producer Flood.

It’s seen starkly on ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ where in the blink of an eye, Rawles is a teenager, having sexual awakenings in a forest with an imaginary lover as she yearns for someone to “love me tender”. It’s a nod to the King of Rock’n’Roll via a mythical figure called Wyman-Elvis, a kind of hybrid God and Elvis Presely who intoxicates Rawles’ imagination.

Her former partner Nick Cave linked Elvis and God on ‘Tupelo’ and ‘Ghosteen’, but in Harvey’s world, Wyman-Elvis represents a fine line between death and life. Time is forever on Harvey’s mind on this album as she enters her fifth decade: she sings about death often, like on the bleak ‘All Souls’ where she contemplates “a flesh farewell”. The ‘Hail To The Thief’-leaning ‘Prayer At The Gate’ see Harvey wonder, via a Thom Yorke-like falsetto, “look before and look behind / at life and death all intertwined” against a backdrop of long-term collaborator James Parish’s skeletal guitars and unsettling, drone-y synths.

Harvey remains – also like Bowie – famously elusive: trying to find autobiographical touchstones is often futile. Yet the girl of ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ who “yearns yet to ungirl” mirrors Harvey’s lifelong fascination with shunning gendered identity tropes amid male gazes, while the eerie title-track sees Rawles desperate to escape a restrictive past – “slip from my childhood skin” – and find freedom in the wilderness – to “zing through the forest”, something Harvey has done throughout her career.

Elsewhere, Rawles frequently escapes inside her own imagination via folky fever dreams (‘A Child’s Question, July’) and electronic dreamscapes (‘A Child’s Question, August’). There are many literary and historical references – Shakespeare, Joan of Arc and Romantic poets like Keats and Coleridge – but references to the latter seem to be at the heart of what the album is about: trying to see the world anew by reconnecting to your past and nature.

Closer ‘A Noiseless Noise’ is the culmination of this as Harvey sings hopefully, “Go home now, love, leave your wandering,” on a track that builds to a crescendo of crashing guitars. She’s seemingly found what she’s looking for on a track that recalls more classic Harvey-eras, after thrashing through the past and the wild.

“I think the album is about searching, looking… and seeking meaning,” Harvey said recently. While the meaning part is sometimes tough to decipher – far more so than her previous work – it’s not the answer here that’s important but the journey. It takes a little time to immerse yourself in Harvey’s world, but once there, you won’t want to leave.