Previewing the July 7 release of its new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, PJ Harvey has today (June 7) unveiled the shuffling, acoustic guitar-led “I Inside the Old I Dying” and black-and-white animated video, which was directed by Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña.
The Polly Jean Harvey-led group will also tour Europe this fall in support of I Inside the Old Year Dying, its first studio album since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project. Two-night stands will take place in each city, beginning Sept. 22-23 in Dublin. North American shows have yet to be announced.
“This delicate and beautiful song eluded us until the very last day in the studio,” Harvey says of the track. “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.”
“In the lyric, everyone is waiting for the savior to reappear – everyone and everything anticipates the arrival of this figure of love and transformation,” she continues. “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.”
“We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection,” León and Cociña 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 artifacts and talismans that are part of a ceremony.”
I Inside the Old Year Dying is PJ Harvey’s first album with Partisan Records.
Here are PJ Harvey’s tour dates:
September 22nd-23rd – 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, Ireland
September 25th-26th – Barrowland, Glasgow, UK
September 28th-29th – Roundhouse, London, UK
October 2nd-3rd – Albert Hall, Manchester, UK
October 6th-7th – Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
October 9th-10th – Cirque Royal, Brussels, Belgium
October 12th-13th – Olympia, Paris, France
October 15th-16th – Volkshaus, Zurich, Switzerland
October 18th-19th – Velký sál Lucerna, Prague, Czech Republic
October 21st-22nd – Admiralspalast, Berlin, Germany
October 24th-25th – Palladium, Warsaw, Poland
October 27th-28th – Falkonersalen, Copenhagen, Denmark
October 30th-31st – Sentrum Scene, Oslo, Norway
