PJ Harvey Debuts “I Inside the Old I Dying”

PJ Harvey photo by Steve Gullick

PJ Harvey has shared new single, “I Inside the Old I Dying” from her forthcoming album I Inside the Old Year Dying.The track is accompanied by an animated music video, directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña. To coincide with this second song release, Harvey has also announced a run of tour dates in the UK – beginning in late September with shows in Dublin, Glasgow, London and Manchester. All dates below

The film’s directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña say: “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.”

Of the new single “I Inside the Old I Dying”, PJ Harvey says: “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 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.”

Harvey first announced ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ with the release of a first single – “A Child’s Question, August” – at the end of April. The album’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realisation that was troubling beyond words.

The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London – lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.

“The studio was set up for live play, and that’s all we did,” she says. The importance of this is hard to overstate: if ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.

PJ HARVEY 2023 TOUR DATES