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Jul 14, 2023 Web Exclusive By Ian Rushbury

For her first album since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, PJ Harvey has turned her attention from rundown public housing in the United States to matters a little closer to her home. I Inside the Old Year Dying revolves around the life of Ira-Abel Rawles, an adolescent girl making her way into womanhood and trying to make sense of the world. The lyrics are peppered with words from the Dorset region of the UK where Harvey grew up. The chorus of “The Nether-edge”—“Now it looks it almost zounds/Wordle zircles wider/With the silence upside down/Horse atop the rider—is as impenetrable as it is disquieting.

Musically, the album covers a lot of bases: from the glitchy stutterings of “All Souls” to the distorted squall of “A Noiseless Noise,” a lot of ground is covered. The thread running through all 12 songs is Harvey’s voice, which navigates all the material with ease. There are some nods to her past: “Autumn Term” could be an acoustic remake of something from her Rid of Me album but it’s a glance backwards rather than self-plagiarism.

Like a lot of her albums, I Inside the Old Year Dying has a real sense of gravitas. There is a weight here, which few other records have. It’s a serious, slow-moving album and the listener has to be prepared for that. It’s a rewarding listen and Harvey along with co-producers Flood and John Parish have created suitably stark, minimal backdrops for Harvey’s elliptical and often arcane wordplay.

Harvey has said that I Inside the Old Year Dying took “many years of work” and “was a difficult album to make” as it “took time to find its strongest form, but it has finally become all [she] hoped for it to be.” Will history show that the album was worth the toil? The early signs are good. I Inside the Old Year Dying has the hallmark of an album that will only get better with age. (pjharvey.net)

Author rating: 8.5/10