PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)

The first reaction to PJ Harvey’s latest studio album, seven years in the waiting for those of us who were (notwithstanding her soundtrack projects for All About Eve, The Virtues or Bad Sisters), must be astonishment that thirty years into their career an artist can still produce something so radically distinct from what’s come before. There are, almost inevitably, hints and echoes of the past, but they are merely that, just as the blushes of other artists – Patti Smith’s ‘Ghost Dance’ on the title track, for instance, rhythms that call to mind Kylie Minogue at her best or vocals mimicking Siouxsie when she still had a voice – amount to nothing more than a drop or two of flavour added to the mix.

It's also necessary to say that this isn’t ‘Orlam put to music’, even though every song derives from a lyric in that book. I’ve said how I found Orlam a baleful and horrible work notwithstanding its brilliance; the album runs with the folklore, flora and fauna, and the personal mythology of the book, but excises the rapes and menace to favour something far less definite and monstrous. It’s weird, but dreamy-weird rather than bloody-weird. Structurally, the poems are bent and reshaped into songs, in the same way Harvey refashioned elements of The Hollow of the Hand into Hope Six. This means that the recording isn’t telling the same story as the book, even when it begins where the book does with ‘Prayer at the Gate’. The twelve tracks don’t follow the year the way Orlam does, but leap around the months, leaving us somewhere toward the end of summer. Mind you, there’s a slight feel of the early 1970s about ‘Autumn Term’ and ‘Seem an I’, or the witchy folk-horror sensibility of ‘A Child’s Question: July’, just the time Harvey was growing up and when Orlam is imagined.

The narrative indeterminacy is intensified by techniques Harvey has never used before, especially sampling found sounds - the children playing on ‘Autumn Term’ or the birds and insects on ‘Noiseless Noise’ - or the rhythmic distortion of her voice (‘The Nether-Edge’). None of it is obvious or clear: the sampled noises are not straightforward scene-setting like the seagulls on Uh Huh Her, but cut into tiny fragments and looped, often placed so low in the mix that you’re not sure what you’re hearing. This means they are not intrusions of the real world into that of the album, but parts of the real world captured and transformed, a bit like a human hair used in a magic spell. Are there church bells close to the end of ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’? And what’s the scraping noise repeated through the first half of ‘August’? Sometimes you fasten onto a sound or aural shape, only to find it disappearing. This is a recording which you absolutely need to listen to on headphones or a high-quality sound system, else most of its subtleties will escape you.

The album in Harvey’s oeuvre closest to the atmosphere of I Inside the Old Year Dying is 1998’s Is This Desire?, a similarly enclosed, dreamy series of soundscapes; but the earlier record’s intense tales were models of clarity and comprensibility compared to this, so internal and hazy. The final track, ‘A Noiseless Noise’, finishes with the plea ‘Come away, love, and leave your wandering’, as though addressing someone emerging from a strange reverie, and perhaps, in the previous forty minutes, that’s just where we’ve been.