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Jun 07, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Steve Gullick

PJ Harvey is releasing a new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, on July 7 via Partisan. Now she has shared its second single, near title track “I Inside the Old I Dying,” via an animated music video. She’s also announced some European tour dates for this fall. Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña directed the video. Watch it below, followed by Harvey’s upcoming tour dates.

Harvey had this to say about the song in a press release: “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 [Parish] 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.”

León and Cociña had this to say about directing the video: “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.”

Previously Harvey shared the album’s first single, “A Child’s Question, August,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week.

I Inside the Old Year Dying is Harvey’s 10th studio album and follows 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, released by Vagrant. Last year she released the boxset compilation, B-Sides, Demos and Rarities, via UMe/Island.

In a previous press release, Harvey said the songs on I Inside the Old Year Dying offer “a resting space, a solace, a comfort, a balm—which feels timely for the times we’re in.”

After she finished touring The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey felt a little lost creatively, uninterested in re-entering the album-tour-album cycle, and instead focussed on poetry, composing music for the stage and screen, and reissuing her previous work. But eventually inspiration struck and the songs on I Inside the Old Year Dying “all came out of me in about three weeks,” she said.

Harvey once again worked with her longtime collaborators, producer/musicians John Parish and Flood, recording at Battery Studios, in North West London. “The studio was set up for live play, and that’s all we did,” she said matter of factly.

Summing up I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey said: “I think the album is about searching, looking—the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning. Not that there has to be a message, but the feeling I get from the record is one of love—it’s tinged with sadness and loss, but it’s loving. I think that’s what makes it feel so welcoming: so open.”

PJ Harvey Tour Dates:

22nd September – 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
23rd September - 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin,Ireland
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
6th October – Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
7th October - Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
9th October – Cirque Royal, Brussels, Belgium
10th October - Cirque Royal, Brussels, Belgium
12th October – Olympia, Paris, France
13th October - Olympia, Paris, France
15th October – Volkshaus, Zurich, Switzerland
16th October – Volkshaus, Zurich, Switzerland
18th October – Velký sál Lucerna, Prague, Czech Republic
19th October – Velký sál Lucerna, Prague, Czech Republic
21st October – Admiralspalast, Berlin, Germany
22nd October – Admiralspalast, Berlin, Germany
24th October – Palladium, Warsaw, Poland
25th October - Palladium, Warsaw, Poland
27th October – Falkonersalen, Copenhagen, Denmark
28th October - Falkonersalen, Copenhagen, Denmark
30th October – Sentrum Scene, Oslo, Norway
31st October – Sentrum Scene, Oslo, Norway

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