PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old Year Dying review

For Polly Jean Harvey repetition is the scourge of creativity. During the process of making her last album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, this intensely private woman offered to the public the role of voyeur, able to observe the process through the other side of one way glass. For someone who keeps their private life hermetically sealed from scrutiny, it was a bold and out of character step.

I Inside The Old Year Dying however presents the listener with a familiar, but still odd dichotomy. This time Harvey wanted the idea of it at least to occupy a smaller space, putting to music selected poems from a collection she released as Orlam in 2022. The contrasting dimension however comes in the album’s vocal treatments, with the goal of specifically avoiding anything which bore too much of a resemblance to the past, or in her words, that sounded “Too PJH”.

This push and pull has one more trick up it’s sleeve in the old time Dorset argot which is used to describe the experiences of album’s the central character, a 12 year old girl called Ira-Abel. Weird? in places yes, this concoction of folk, lo-fi electronica, denuded rock and “other stuff” is certainly that, there’s little point in saying otherwise. But there are also undoubtedly moments of genius, as Lwonesome Tonight, Seem An I and The Nether-edge present different facets to an artist who supposedly believes any kind of legacy is a jail.

Almost unique in a world clogged with repetition and sameyness, I Inside The Old Year Dying is PJ Harvey’s reminder to us all that music is still, after all, an art form if that’s the way we want to see it. Brilliant and bizarre, off it’s idiosyncratic map, who knows how much currency that idea still has.

You can read a full review here.