PJ Harvey announces extensive UK and Europe tour, shares title track of new album I Inside The Old I Dying
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PJ Harvey has announced an extensive autumn tour composed of two night-stands in major cities across the UK and Europe.
The singer has also shared a new single, I Inside The Old I Dying, the title track of her upcoming 10th album, the follow-up to 2016's The Hope Six Demolition Project, which is scheduled to emerge on July 7 via Partisan. Listen to it here.
Harvey describes the song as a "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," she explains, "and/but then [longtime collaborator] John [Parish] reinvented the feel of the guitar pattern. As he was demonstrating it in the control room, Flood [producer] 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 saviour 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."
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña made the song’s video, which shows a man and his dog on a journey — camping, urinating, and appreciating a confluence of nature and domestic life. “We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection,” the filmmakers said in a joint statement. “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.”
Since the release of her last album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey helped write the soundtrack for Bad Sisters and authored the novel in verse, Orlam. The latter, she says, played a role in the inspiration behind I Inside the Old Year Dying. Another key moment for her was meeting filmmaker Steve McQueen, who suggested she focus on her love of words, images, and music as elements rather than writing “an album.” Subsequently, the LP’s songs came to her in about three weeks. She recorded it with her longtime collaborators, producers Flood and John Parish, at London’s Battery Studios.
“I think the album is about searching, looking — the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,” Harvey said in a statement. “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.”
