The inimitable PJ Harvey has existential matters on her mind in her new single, “I Inside the Old I Dying”.
Taken from her forthcoming album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, the song is typically thoughtful and generous, desiring multiple listens.
“This delicate and beautiful song eluded us until the very last day in the studio,” the English singer-songwriter says. “Over the previous five weeks we had tried so many times to capture it and failed, and/but then John (Parish) 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.”
As Harvey explains, the narrative is about everyone 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.”
“I Inside the Old I Dying” comes with an animated video, directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, which gorgeously visualises Harvey’s lyrics.
“We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection,” the co-directors say. “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 artefacts and talismans that are part of a ceremony.”
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Harvey’s 10th studio album will be released next month, and it will be her first since 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project. The record will also contain previous single “A Child’s Question, August”.
PJ Harvey’s “I Inside the Old I Dying” is out now. I Inside the Old Year Dying is out Friday, July 7th via Partisan/Liberator Records (pre-save/pre-order here).
