PJ Harvey has shared new song ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’.
The songwriter is embarking on a fresh chapter, with a full studio album set to land on July 7th via Partisan Records. ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ is her first since 2016, and it follows her book-length poem Orlam.
New song ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’ – as close to the title as you can get, we suppose – is online now, a powerful work, tender in its sparsity but also containing a soft intensity.
Discussing its gestation, PJ Harvey comments:
“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 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.”
A subtle work, ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’ is accompanied by an animated video sculpted by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña. The pair comment…
“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.”
Tune in now.
Photo Credit: Steve Gullick
