PJ Harvey signs to Partisan and announces new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying

After 30 years of being with Island Records, PJ Harvey has signed to Partisan Records – home to IDLES and Fontaines D.C., to release her tenth studio album, I Inside the Old Year Dying.

The new album – Harvey’s first since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, which picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album and debuted at Number One in the UK Charts – is produced by long-time collaborators Flood and John Parish. The song release, "A Child's Question, August" comes with a video, directed by Steve Gullick.

I Inside the Old Year Dying’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards – that she had lost her connection with music itself.

This was hardly a time of creative withdrawal: thanks to mentoring by the Scottish poet Don Paterson, she worked on Orlam, the accomplished work of poetry – her second, after 2015’s The Hollow of the Hand - that was published last year and became one of the new album’s key inspirations.

The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. Recorded at Battery Studios, in North West London, I Inside the Old Year Dying came out of a batch of live recordings and improvisation.

A meeting with the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen, in Chicago, during the Hope Six period helped set off a spark within PJ Harvey. His advice was to remember what she loves about words, images and music and to put away the concept of writing “an album” to focus on and play with these three passions. She began to find the magic again, by reaching for the piano or her guitar, and playing Nina Simone and Bob Dylan songs.

“The studio was set up for live play, and that's all we did,” Harvey says. “I think the album is about searching, looking – the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,” she continues. “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 is the only musician to have been awarded the UK’s Mercury Music Prize more than once, winning first in 2001 for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and again in 2011 for Let England Shake.

Tracklist:

1. Prayer at the Gate
2. Autumn Term
3. Lwonesome Tonight
4. Seem an I
5. The Nether-edge
6. I Inside the Old Year Dying
7. All Souls
8. A Child’s Question, August
9. I Inside the Old I Dying
10. August
11. A Child’s Question, July
12. A Noiseless Noise