After sharing her new single on the BBC last week, English chanteuse PJ Harvey has released the video for “The Wheel,” off of her forthcoming album The Hope Six Demolition Project (due April 15 via Island Records). Premiered on Noisey, the clip takes place in Kosovo, where Harvey and photojournalist Seamus Murphy visited — along with Afghanistan and Washington, D.C. in the four years since her last album, 2011’s Let England Shake — and which inspired the album. (Murphy also worked with Harvey on her 2015 book of poetry, The Hollow of the Hand.) Of the footage, which follows children, shepherds, and other members of the community around abandoned motels and dilapidated playgrounds, Murphy told Noisey:
The song “The Wheel” has the journey to Kosovo at its center. Who is to say what else has influenced and informed its creation? The sight of a revolving fairground wheel in Fushe Kosove/Kosovo Polje near the capital Pristina is the concrete reference point for the title. I can tell you its date — 4th August 2011 — from the piece of footage I made as we walked up the street to our parked car near the train station. It was a passing observation of a commonplace image, one of many that day. While Polly took notes I might have been more interested in something else happening across the street and not bothered to shoot or even have seen it. That day we were gathering material in a blind, optimistic endeavor; characteristic of the way we tend to work together. We had no idea if any of it would ever be seen, heard or would make sense.
Watch the video for “The Wheel” below.
https://cache.vevo.com/assets/html/embed.html?video=GBUV71502051
