I INSIDE THE OLD YEAR DYING – new album out July 7th

[revenire]

I've listened to it once now on a proper stereo system. There is a lot going on sonically in this record. It is quite unlike anything I've heard her do. At first, based on snippets I thought maybe it was close to some of the songs on A Woman a Man Walked By, but after listening to entire songs on a good system, it no longer reminds me of that. There is something eerie about the record. Something spooky. It is unsettling. It is good, very good. I wonder if this will be looked on as one of her masterpieces ala LES...

[ct4spinner]

I am waiting for tomorrow before I listen to the whole album. At least it is causing a reaction for the scribes. Some great, some grate! Remember who would you rather be: the artist who creates or the journalist who critiques?

[lepetitlord]

I'm really enjoying the album, and Tom Taylor is indeed "Far out" of the truth cause i can tell right away this is a record i'll go back to regularly, unlike it's predecessor.

Spoiler! :

Prayer at the Gate is probably my fav atm along with the title track.
I connect with every songs except All Souls and August for now, altho the first one has the merit of being probably the most "futuristic" sounding song of her entire discography.
I keep having Autumn Term in mind and going back to it quite a lot already, the piano progression makes me think about Radiohead very much (and i love it!)
Not the best fan of the Nether-edge's ending section unfortunately but the first part is absolutely fantastic.
Really enjoying the ending a Child's Question, July, and all the atmospheric soundscape on the album overall, really unique, crooked, both archaic and innovative
The very last minute of the album is wonderfully haunting (it evokes me ITD? and the end tracks of Holy Wood of MM, weirdly)

Really curious to see how this album evolves in me, and really impatient for the shows !

[Romario11]

I don't remember so many reviews for the last album, here are a couple more.

https://ghostcultmag.com/album-review-p ... n-records/

Spoiler! :

Venerated singer-songwriter PJ Harvey has returned with her tenth album, the first since her 2016 release The Hope Six Demolition Project. This new record is entitled I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan Records) and Harvey has once again collaborated with producers Flood and John Parish.


Always keen to explore new styles, influences and approaches with each release, Harvey notes that she and her two producer-collaborators consciously wanted to “challenge ourselves and not repeat ourselves” this time around. Having initially struggled to find a direction for her next project, and even questioning whether she wanted to continue to write and release music, Harvey ultimately found that “a change of scale…to something really small” allowed the songs to flow out “in about three weeks”.



Indeed, I Inside the Old Year Dying features more pared-back arrangements than many of Harvey’s more “rock band” oriented records. Most of the tracks make heavy use of lo-fi ambient sound recordings and effects complied with and manipulated by Flood. These lend a sense of dreamlike mystery to the songs. Harvey also tried to sing in a different style to her usual “PJ Harvey voice”, and her vocal delivery seems to carry a folky, wistful quality here. That said, her voice is still recognisable and is mixed front-and-centre with sparse acoustic guitar and synth parts as well as stark drums providing sombre and melancholy musical backdrops.

The songs themselves are perhaps more meandering and less direct and hook-laden than much of Harvey’s previous output; instead, this feels likealbum music to get lost in and let wash over you. That said, the songs are nearly all under four minutes long and are all led by Harvey’s austere and mournful vocal melodies. And whilst the record may not be full of singalong choruses, the elegiac refrains have a way of weaving their way into your consciousness.



I Inside the Old Year Dying feels like a very personal album; experiencing it is perhaps a little bit like watching Harvey’s mind play out a strange and unsettling dream. Comparisons could be made to Portishead’s most affecting moments, or even to the darkly bucolic output of sixties/seventies folk revivalists such as Sandy Denny or Jaqui McShee. But, ultimately, this record seems to exist in its own world, oddly disjointed yet weirdly familiar.



Undoubtedly PJ Harvey has succeeded in creating an album that explores as much new territory as conceivably possible whilst still being recognisably her own. It might lack the immediacy or fierceness that some would wish for, but in amongst its muted and restrained atmospherics are songs as powerful and poignant as any of Harvey’s output. I Inside the Old Year Dying gently draws you into its illusory world of peculiar wonder and demands repeat listens.

https://www.stereogum.com/2228689/pj-ha ... valuation/

Spoiler! :

An artist’s initial work often sets the tone for how they’re perceived for the rest of their career. So it went with PJ Harvey: Her electric early ’90s albums Dry and Rid Of Me established her as a ferocious guitarist and vocalist who chronicled womanhood with unapologetic candor — a reputation that has stuck with her, to some extent, ever since. But during a career that now spans more than three decades, Harvey has intentionally detonated any attempts at being boxed in; she’s explored avenues like bewitching alternative rock (1995’s To Bring You My Love), crunchy glam (2000’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea), and antique piano compositions (2007’s White Chalk). If anything, the fervent rawness of her first records now seems like a mere starting point, not a defined pathway.

Accordingly, Harvey’s tenth studio album, I Inside The Old Year Dying—her first proper solo album since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project —is less of a career sharp turn than it is a soft bend in the road. Although she and long-time collaborators Flood and John Parish were determined to create something that didn’t repeat past work, the musical approach and vibes build on the foundations of her previous albums.

Meticulous arrangements abound, driven by moody melodies, sparse beats, and Harvey’s expressive vocals. The instrumentation is also precise and deliberate; every note and sound are clearly used to enhance the music’s emotional impact in very specific ways. Prominent drums exude stretched-out funk on “Autumn Term”; “All Souls” is extra-minimalist electro sighing with muffled piano and galloping beats; droning guitar and glitchy drums give “The Nether-edge” an uneasy edge.

At the same time, I Inside The Old Year Dying is nearly impossible to squeeze into one genre or mood. The album exists in a liminal space between sounds and worlds, hinting at (but never quite alighting on) folk, electronic, gothic, post-rock, and orchestral music. That’s partly because of Flood’s production style, which always aims to envelop listeners in lush, twilight atmospheres, but also because Harvey mixed field recordings and sounds from audio library archives with standard instrumentation. “I definitely hoped that I could sort of be in every era and no era all at the same time,” she told The Guardian.

I Inside The Old Year Dying arrives as Harvey has expanded the scope of her creative output in recent years. She unlocked her vault and released dozens of demos in tandem with reissues of her back catalog. She wrote original music for theatre productions and the TV miniseries Bad Sisters. For good measure, she also penned a collection of poetry, 2022’s Orlam, that doubles as the lyrical source material for I Inside The Old Year Dying. Set in Dorset, England, the poems follow a nine-year-old girl named Ira-Abel as she experiences a pivotal, transformative time in her life.

In contrast with the political and social critiques found on The Hope Six Demolition Project, the new album resembles a classic epic poem you might read in a college English class, or a kinder, gentler Grimm’s Fairy Tale. (The album’s first line even feels like the beginning of a story: “As childhood died the new-born year/Made the soldier reappear.”) I Inside The Old Year Dying’s lyrics are dense and challenging. Using elegant, poetic language that has its own vernacular, Harvey weaves together various thematic strands: new beginnings, jarring endings, tentative rebirth, and loving explorations. In a nod to the disorienting experience of growing up, the imagery is both fanciful and eclectic; it references both “chalky children of evermore” and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” and incorporates references to vivid, dream-like characters.

Fittingly, Harvey’s vocal approach on this album feels otherworldly. Gone is her forceful and familiar delivery; in its place she employs dramatic falsetto (“Prayer At The Gate”) and a soaring wail (“August”), becomes a conspiratorial narrator (“All Souls”) or takes a casual and conversational tone (“Seem An I”). On “I Inside The Old I Dying,” Harvey even channels the cracked croon of her one-time collaborator Thom Yorke, while Ben Wishaw shades Harvey’s voice tenderly on two songs, “August” and “A Child’s Question, August.”

What’s most striking is that Harvey sounds different from song to song, as if she’s inhabiting different characters in each one. These vocal shifts were another deliberate choice, “Any time I seemed to be singing in what they would call my PJ Harvey voice, it was vetoed,” she said in the album’s press materials. The cynical take on this decision is that she’s running away from her strengths for the sake of change. A more charitable (and correct) reading is that I Inside The Old Year Dying is best considered as a collection of discrete musical vignettes.

Speaking to The Guardian, Harvey once again stressed that Flood and John Parish shared her desire to push into new territory. “None of us are interested in treading over the same ground, and the more you’ve worked together, the harder that is. The more songs I’ve written, it’s harder to write songs because I so often start something and think, well, mm, that’s a bit like that song I wrote in 1996.”

Given what a rich, engaging back catalog Harvey has, it can be frustrating that I Inside The Old Year Dying doesn’t have more callbacks to her sonic past. In fact, the album ends with a trio of songs that do channel some of her best moments, starting with the ghostly, Is This Desire?-esque “August” and the playful-but-ominous “A Child’s Question, July.” I Inside The Old Year Dying then ends with “A Noiseless Noise,” which feels like a particularly strong echo of her early days: Discordant guitar and pounding drums give way to a quieter moment where Harvey sings poignant lines (“Just a noiseless noise/ Just a gawly girl/ Just a bogus boy”) that hint at gender nonconformity.

However, Harvey’s music always reflects where she is now in her life—not where she’s already been or where we’d like her to be. That’s a deeply admirable place from which to create. In fact, she’s pulled off quite a feat making reinvention the aim of her career. It’s certainly a far more challenging— and enriching — way to make music and be an artist, and equally exciting from the listener perspective. I Inside The Old Year Dying demands close attention and full concentration, as its surprises and gifts are revealed over time.

“I definitely go through times where I wonder if I still have the ability to write the songs I dream of writing,” Harvey told The Guardian. “Am I still any good? Have I still got it? But I’ll keep having a go. And usually, if I persevere, I can get there.”

[revenire]

I love her singing on Prayer at the Gate. It sounds so wild and beautiful.

[AineteEkaterini]

Some very bad reviews above ...

Oh, this is nothing. I always think PJ's bad reviews tell you more than the good ones do, if only about the reviewers. To Bring You My Love was 'empty', 'cold-blooded', 'pretentious', 'articulating nothing more than her own cleverness', and Time Out decided it was the worst album of the year: 'this utterly graceless singer', 'a hopelessly mannered CD with its distorted vocals and theatrical emotionality'.

[ct4spinner]

Some one likes it

https://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/revie ... year-dying

Prayer at the Gate opens PJ Harvey’s first album in seven years like a lost portal creaking into use. Drawing the listener into a meticulously constructed world wholly her own, Harvey implores you to cast aside your prejudgments with a found language teetering on the brink of familiarity and uncanniness. 'Wyman, am I worthy? Speak your wordle to me', she sings and, with that, all her personae – grunge feminist, filicidal killer, pop star, war poet – crumble away to lead you on through a record unlike anything else she’s released. But Harvey has always been a storyteller. I Inside the Old Year Dying sees her leave behind the journalistic music of her previous record, The Hope Six Demolition Project, and mine new depths of imagination.


Harvey continues her collaboration with long-time musical partners John Parish and Flood, pairing indelible melodies and structures with a writerly form that intertwines modernism with ancient unknowns. It has less in common with her previous work than it does with the novels of an author like Max Porter (someone Harvey has publicly admired), who pairs avant-garde style with a penchant for folkloric creatures and magical manifestations. Harvey here is fascinated with nature and a countryside populated by blethering angels, 'chalky children' and myth. It has the aura of an artefact from long ago that displays characteristics out of its time. Take Lwonesome Tonight, where Harvey sings with the archaic or invented vocabulary of some past century, but about Elvis and Pepsi.

Further blurring the picture is the way Harvey uses her voice – stretching it and muffling it and undulating in ways unfamiliar (notes from the recording sessions reveal Harvey was specifically directed to sing as little like herself as possible). An effective smattering of electronic manipulation of her vocals, notably on the I Inside the Old I Dying and The Nether-edge, and the use of samples and field recordings on Autumn Term and Seem an I make placing the record temporally difficult and lend to the overall sense of feeling untethered.

As the title suggests, I Inside the Old Year Dying feels like a product of Harvey cocooning, burrowing into a space that feels protected and unhinged from relevance or topicality, as time and space wither. With that she has produced her most beguiling work.

Listen to: Autumn Term, All Souls, A Child’s Question, July

http://pjharvey.net

[ct4spinner]

https://beatsperminute.com/album-review ... ear-dying/

“I was quite lost,” says Polly Harvey of the period that produced her new, 10th (and first for seven years) LP I Inside the Old Year Dying. “I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do: if I wanted to carry on writing albums and playing, or if it was time for a change in my life- ‘OK, I’ve done this for a long time. Do I want to carry on for the remainder of my life doing the same thing?’”

It probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to hear that Harvey, burnt out by a gruelling year-long world tour in support of 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, found herself in a rut. There hadn’t been a single whisper of new studio recording since then – she had worked diligently on music for the stage and for film and TV soundtracks and, of course, had been working on the beautiful, strange Orlam, her poetry collection that published last spring.

Sprinkled in the middle of this period was a delicious reissue campaign of her entire back catalogue with accompanying demos albums – manna for the PJ Harvey fan. But you got the sense that there was something of a shift happening in real time for Harvey; the album-tour-album cycle had been resolutely broken and she was pursuing her artistic urges in oblique and sometimes obscure new directions.

It wasn’t the first time Harvey expressed doubts on her future in the music business – she told Q magazine in 2001 that she almost gave up music to retrain as a nurse in the low period between 1995’s To Bring You My Love and 1998’s Is This Desire? – but the move towards writing, particularly on such an all-encompassing work as Orlam, had an air of finality about it and the lengthening gap seemed to support a sense that Harvey might just be done in terms of recording new albums.

So seeing studio photos by Steve Gullick uploaded to her Instagram account in February 2022 was, certainly, an exciting and surprising change of pace. As it turns out, Harvey was in the thick of recording her new album at London’s Battery Studios with long-time collaborators John Parish and Flood. She describes how the songs “fell out of [her]” within three weeks, and indeed the music has both an immediacy and a haziness that suggests a conception that is far from studied and rehearsed.

What is a PJ Harvey album in 2023 going to sound like? Harvey has made a career on sharp turns, unexpected diversions, the persistent search for new ways of singing, writing, recording. Hope Six, for all its lively garage-rock swagger and vivid sketches, felt somewhat distant and cold and, following on from its counterpart Let England Shake, seemed to occupy a similar kind of space thematically and in terms of performance – Harvey’s voice high and reedy, the outside narrator observing the scene without opinion or emotion. The last time Harvey felt such an innate need for something new was on 2007’s White Chalk, where she ditched the guitar for the piano and traded the raw energy of her previous records for an album of strange, austere, gothic ballads of autumnal beauty. She sang in a new, plaintive voice – her “church voice” – and wrote songs that were somehow both thrillingly different and offbeat but made sense within the Harvey oeuvre.

I Inside the Old Year Dying, perhaps not coincidentally then, most closely resembles White Chalk in terms of its mood and style – perhaps incongruously released in July, it is certainly an autumnal listen; Harvey sings most of it in a higher register and there is an elegant, restrained intimacy that recalls some of White Chalk. But it does not share the same piano-centric DNA and, indeed, some of it also recalls the ramshackle folksiness of some of the deeper cuts on 2004’s Uh Huh Her. In fundamental terms, it trades Let England Shake and Hope Six’s looking-outwards philosophy to focus firmly on the interior. “I instinctively needed a change of scale,” Harvey has said. “There was a real yearning in me to change it back to something really small – so it comes down to one person, one wood, a village.”

The “one person, one wood, a village” refers to Ira-Abel Rawles, the central figure in Harvey’s poem Orlam, which forms the basis for the lyrics of I Inside the Old Year Dying. Ira is a young girl growing up in the fictional Dorset village of Underwhelem, surrounded by a peculiar crop of villagers and family. Orlam is a story of awakening, the tension between the natural world and physical reality, and the inevitability of the passing of the seasons, all of which are loosely evoked throughout the album.

The Harvey of 2023 is no longer an artistic compartmentaliser, which is why it might take some getting used to in understanding that the album occupies the same artistic terrain as the book. The filmmaker Steve McQueen told Harvey during the Hope Six era: “Polly, you have to stop thinking about music like it’s all albums of songs. You’ve got to think about what you love. You love words, you love images and you love music. And you’ve got to think, What can I do with those three things?”

It’s not necessary to know Orlam to be able to enjoy I Inside the Old Year Dying, but such is the esoteric nature of the work that, as song lyrics, they are far more oblique than we’re used to from Harvey. As a lyricist, and indeed as a musician, Harvey has always been pretty direct. The deceptive simplicity in her work, both lyrically and musically, has always been her superpower. I Inside the Old Year Dying marks a significant change in this regard – written in Dorset dialect and sung again with her natural accent (yes, recalling that “church voice” of White Chalk), the text is an allegory of childhood, adolescence, the natural world – it’s an evocation of the English countryside and rural magic realism.

There are thematic threads that weave in and out – the shadowy symbol of Wyman-Elvis, who is both a Christ-like mythical figure and a ghostly spectre (“are you Elvis? Are you God?” she sings on the fragile and folky “Lwonesome Tonight”), the dreaded feeling of starting school, and the haunting refrains of “Love Me Tender” that shift in and out of several songs. It’s not something that the listener is particularly able to pin down, and that appears to be the point – I Inside the Old Year Dying seems not to be an album that you are supposed to “understand,” but instead one that you feel. A lot of the songs are about memories and delving back into the past, and the music and production – which is not rough in the sense of Uh Huh Her but not polished like a Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – perfectly captures the distance, both physical and mental, of memory and the passing of time.

The Dorset dialect lends the album its unique poetic sensibility and also contributes to its slippery feeling of unknowability; “Quaterevil takes a wife / chilver meets her Maker / as the grindstone turns the knife / o’er Eleven Acres,” scans “The Nether-Edge.” It’s beautiful and strange and not your usual PJ Harvey lyric. But, just as readily, she emerges with imagery as familiar as “Pepsi fizz / peanut and banana sandwiches.”

Some songs have a formative, Beefhearty vibe, from the rough-hewn guitar roll of “Seem an I” (translated as “Seems to Me”) to the ramshackle chaos of the delivery of “Autumn Term”, but anyone familiar with Harvey’s soundtrack work post-Hope Six – particularly All About Eve – will recognise the restrained elegance in some of the chord structures of songs like “Prayer at the Gate” and “Lwonesome Tonight”. I Inside the Old Year Dying is an album that seems to hinge on these kind of fault-lines – between the corporeal and the imagined, the poetic and the prosaic, the bridge between childhood and adulthood. Of “life and death all innertwined,” as she keens on “Prayer on the Gate”.

Musically, the deft fusion of the delicate and the hearty reflects Harvey’s thematic explorations; the production is full of strange quirks, whether found sounds or unusual effects that are sometimes inserted and not repeated. The effect is that the music feels both hazy and alive, evoking the Orlam world in its strange splendour.

Another key to the sound is the use of male vocals not just for contrast but for poetic resonance, and the way Harvey employs the voices of Parish and actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan is haunting and rather beautiful. The interpolation of Whishaw singing a segment of “Love Me Tender” in the foggy magnificence that is “August” is nothing short of stunning, while Parish’s crazed singing with Harvey on “Autumn Term” has a bizarre, nightmarish vibe that captures that first-day-of-school dread – “I ascend three steps to hell / the school bus heaves up the hill.” Morgan, meanwhile, provides the folk-horror chant that “A Child’s Question, July,” is built around – all Wicker Man ritual, with its “twoad”-licking and rural dance around the phallic Ooser-Rod.

For an album that evokes childhood and adolescence so strongly, I Inside the Old Year Dying makes use of some of Harvey’s most girlish singing – the beginning of “Seem an I”, for instance, is sung as if she were a girl singing to herself at the bus stop. It then morphs into its Beefheart roll, and it also puts me in mind loosely of “Heaven”, one of Harvey’s earliest recordings, that later emerged as a b-side in the White Chalk era. There is that same innocence of sound, the simple and joyful guitar pattern (although slowed and rougher), and the murky merging of the past and the present. In some ways, it makes sense on such a record that Harvey might subconsciously revisit something from the past.

The Beefheart influence found in so much of Harvey’s work can also be detected, for me, on “Autumn Term”, which seems to heave and creak like the bus in the lyrics; it’s sung in a deranged yet contained A Woman A Man Walked By style. “The Nether-edge”, meanwhile, begins with a disembodied vocal effect; it has a strange, strident beat that recalls Pink Floyd’s menacing “One of These Days”, before becoming something altogether jauntier.

“I Inside the Old Year Dying” is a classic Harvey acoustic guitar D-minor stomp with beautiful, reverb-drenched piano piercing the fog; “All Souls” is a melancholy dirge, one that starts so purely and softly, with one of Harvey’s gentlest and loveliest vocals, before the arrangement builds into a heavy hymn. “A Child’s Question, August” is both a deceptive and appropriate trailer for the record – it’s probably one of the least interesting songs on the record, but successfully suggests its broad themes and style. Following on from “All Souls”, though, is a sequencing gamble that threatens to swamp the mid-section of the album in sloth.

The gorgeous “I Inside the Old I Dying”, though, is one of the album’s gems with its shuffling percussion, Parish’s gossamer guitar part, and Harvey’s graceful melody; the uncertain vocal delivery was a purposeful choice – “I was standing in the vocal room with the headphones on, and Flood said ‘No, no–you sound like PJ Harvey.’” Harvey ended up recording the vocal with her eyes closed, unaware of where the microphone was, which lends it its blurred, out-of-focus quality. “Flood would just experiment all the time like that, to find the thing he wanted,” says Harvey.

The same can be said of the magnificent opener “Prayer at the Gate”, which is sung, as a lot of the album is, in Harvey’s upper register – but there is a warmth and strength in the delivery that is so much more appealing than on Let England Shake or Hope Six. It’s a beautiful, emotional invocation that recalls some of her work on the All About Eve soundtrack and, at its climax, Harvey sings in an unabashed, radiant high vibrato that is somewhat new for her and possesses a real yearning and sad desperation. It’s a beauty.

At the opposite end of the record, “A Noiseless Noise”, seemingly from nowhere, brings out a heavy, propulsive rhythm not heard on a Harvey record in a while and she also unleashes a vocal that is pure Stories grit, power, and sheen. As much as one respects Harvey’s resolve in not wanting to repeat herself, it’s a joy to hear something a bit more unbridled again that, to her credit, hangs together well with the rest of the material.

Although comparisons with earlier records might provide loose reference points, ultimately comparison is futile in trying to pin down the sound of an album that simply will not be pinned down – I Inside the Old Year Dying succeeds where all Harvey records do, in breaking new ground for her. Its plaintive beauty and major/minor contrasts recall some of her more intimate work and it exists within the same world as Harvey’s more apparently personal, “English” work, but there is a newness in the decision to include more found sounds and effects – birdsong, bells, schoolchildren, strange nocturnal noises – that make it sound alive, immediate, and particularly with Orlam as a base text, it’s definitely its own universe.

Somehow, though, it feels transitional. It doesn’t present as a bold step forward, nor Harvey’s most daring volte-face. This isn’t to say it is not an important artistic moment for Harvey – in many ways, it might be one of her most personally important records. Breaking new ground doesn’t need to mean something entirely leftfield. It feels like a gentle but decisive turn towards a new direction, the sound of Harvey making sense of where she is at artistically. It’s the sound of an artist who had obviously been uncertain where to go and how to go about it but has pulled the threads together into something meaningful for her creative future – Harvey speaks about being “broken-hearted” at fearing she had fallen out of love with music after 2017, and how she slowly found a way in again by playing her favourite songs by other artists on the piano or guitar – Nina Simone, The Stranglers, The Mamas and the Papas.

I Inside the Old Year Dying is probably most important because it represents Harvey’s vision clearing – the confusion about which direction to take, having become more comfortable with writing music as accompaniment to existing work and focusing on poetry, has crystallised into the realisation that there needn’t be a choice. At one point, Harvey thought I Inside the Old Year Dying might end up as a stage piece; instead, it’s its own world on record, the aural cousin of Orlam. Harvey describes it as a “resting space, a solace, a comfort.” That can be said for both its content and its result.

I Inside the Old Year Dying is a record that takes time to find its way in. There is more to uncover than might first appear – which is also one of the general themes of Orlam and the associated song lyrics. You’re never quite sure exactly where you are – Harvey’s voice is often mixed very much front and centre but is deliberately contrasted with the reverb in the instrumentation and the comparatively dry recording of the percussion to create an eccentric, ambiguous hinterland that moves in and out of focus.

“I’m somewhere I’ve not been before,” says Harvey. “What’s above, what’s below, what’s old, what’s new, what’s night, what’s day? It’s all the same really – and you can enter it and get lost. And that’s what I wanted to do with the record, with the songs, with the sound, with everything.” On this basis, Harvey has succeeded in her aims.

There is enough here that suggests both a looking back and a looking forwards – again, that bridge between new and old, the past and the future, the real and the fantastical. As ever, where she goes next is anyone’s guess.

[Orange Monkey]

Has anyone got one of these?

[TheNightingale]

‘Life and death is such a fine line’: PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds
— a 40-minute conversation with Ann Powers for NPR (audio + transcription)

[an tha]

Not sure if already posted - but a decent read.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/11857499 ... -interview

[arnovice]

A journalist of French National radio, France Inter, interviewed Polly last week in Paris. It was broadcast in 2 parts, it was translated on the air but one can hear her voice very well. Click each time on "écouter".

1st part: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/ ... 23-6658790

2nd part: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/ ... 23-6084814

[Hell and High Water]

My copy arrived today!!
I'll have to set aside some time to listen later.

[Sebastiano Boina]

here's the complete album on youtube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5 ... vIrlRbvJOU

Can't wait to buy it and listen to it closely.

[an tha]

Listening now.

She sounds incredible on the opener "Prayer at The Gate"

Different but incredible. Great start.