44: On her first studio album in seven years, PJ Harvey abandons the language of 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition in favor of enigmatic, awing storytelling. Fit with samples and field recordings, the soundscape at play across the tracklist is some of the English singer/songwriter’s most ambitious and experimental work yet. As good and emotive as anything she did on Dry and Rid of Me, Harvey embodies a poetic machine, delivering some of her strongest, most vivid lines yet. “Hear the grinding wheel-bird grieve / Grief unknits my raveled sleeve / Death of zummer, death of play / Waxing night and dwindling day / Help me dunnick, drush and dove / Love Me Tender. Tender love,” she sings on “A Children’s Question, August.” We may never see a 30-year career culminate in such a rich, imaginative collection of songs—and it’s no surprise that Harvey remains in a league of her own on I Inside The Old Year Dying. —Matt Mitchell

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I Inside the Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey

In an astonishing 30-year career, Polly Jean Harvey has always been something of a folk-horror artist—whether it’s through unearthing jagged edges of human desire or crafting missals based on the horrors of war. Fittingly, her 10th solo album was initially conceived as a theater piece, reviving the nearly-forgotten dialect of Dorset she used to write Orlam, the poetry book she published last year.

Still, even in I Inside the Old Year Dying’s final album form, there is an element of theatrical world-building that both terrifies and enchants as you immerse yourself within its dream logic. Field recordings and textured instrumental layers create a disquieting atmosphere wrapped up in fever dream fantasies of Elvis as a deity and nights passing by in an ancient forest landscape. In the future, it probably won’t be the best introductory album for new PJ Harvey fans, but for those of us already entwined in her web, it’s another spellbinding body of work that will require frequent revisits to fully unravel. – ES

15. PJ Harvey
I Inside the Old Year Dying
Journeying back to the Dorset of her upbringing, and its attendant folklore, Harvey’s remarkable tenth album addressed the transition from childhood to adulthood, the power of myth and symbolism and the blurred boundaries between the ancient and the modern.

2. PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old Year Dying

Although PJ Harvey's discography is too unruly to be fully anatomised by this framework, I Inside The Old Year Dying still embodies many qualities of late style. Lacking the propulsive confidence found in Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the charged, war film quality of Let England Shake, or even the keening, strident quality of White Chalk (the closest thing it sonically resembles), this tenth LP finds its stimulus not in broad concepts or thrusting power but – much like Beethoven after 1812 – their antitheses: quiet reflection, fragmentation and mystery.

It's a loose, nimble work of neo folk that pokes its head into desert blues, experimental rock and country, then has a good nose around. It manages to sound both mediaeval and futuristic, with big hollow kick drums booming underneath queasy loops and staticky textures, the tales of "milchi seeps heady in the meadows" ringing over boinging, squelching electronics. At a push, we might term this intelligent folk dance music. Or acid alehouse. Or… breakwheat? Field recordings (courtesy of Adam Bartlett) and strange, blustery frequencies also contribute to the mulch and oomska of the music (helped in no small part by Harvey's creative partnership with Flood and John Parish, who provided production and additional instrumentation). The lived-in sogginess of this music seems to be a way of accessing hitherto-siloed wells of emotion and intensity. Thrumming thickets of rhythm in 'I Inside The Old I Dying' evoke perfectly the movement through the forest described in the lyrics, while on 'Prayer At The Gate', the audible rushes of breath are of equal importance to the accompanying pained vocalisations.
Will Ainsley

77. PJ Harvey: “I Inside the Old I Dying”

Shrouded in the fog of Dorset’s hills came the legendary singer and songwriter PJ Harvey’s 10th full-length album this past July. Single “I Inside The Old I Dying” is the perfect combination of everything we love about Harvey and everything we didn’t yet know she contained within her. Like the other tracks on I Inside The Old Year Dying, this offering is largely based on Orlam, the collection of poetry Harvey released back in 2022. She sings in the Dorset dialect of English, repeating a chorus of “Oh Wyman, Oh Wyman, / Unray I for en,” which translates to something along the lines of “Oh Wyman, I undress myself for you.” In the fog of her layered vocals, keys and three types of guitars, all is destabilized. And while it doesn’t sound at all like anything else she’s done, it still sounds undoubtedly like PJ Harvey: screeching heights on the verses that find resolve in a deep, rich chorus. She uses the thinning of her voice’s upper register to her own advantage; the clarity of her sound is otherworldly, but her lows are a rich parachute guiding you quickly back to the ground. Harvey described the song as one of “ethereal and melancholic longing,” and the sheer emotive power of the track truly does transcend all. —Madelyn Dawson

Polly Jean Harvey is a daughter of Dorset, an English region of Jurassic cliffs and boggy forests, of fading villages and the intriguing remnants of a language mostly now spoken by the dead. For her 10th studio album, she immersed herself in the rhythms of her native countryside, following the seasons as she imagined a young girl's passage into adulthood and, through violence, a kind of supernatural immortality. Based on her novel in verse Orlam, I Inside the Old Year Dying finds a new way to invoke rural customs and lore, freeing these old sources from the trad-folk trappings that have often frozen them dead and adjusting her own inimitable art-rock sound to suit a narrative teeming with wildlife and the smells of the woods. She also learned the nearly extinct Dorset dialect, incorporating its pithy syllables into her lyrics. But here, also, lies the revenant of Elvis Presley, and of rusted old automobiles and other late 20th century relics. Her small group of collaborators, including musical soulmate John Parish, producer Flood and the field recordings gatherer Cecil, bring this region of nether-edges alive in a wondrous way. Harvey's voice has never resonated quite like this before — delicate, alien, a child's and an ancient spirit's, as ethereal and natural as the sun that touches the wilderness where no road has been cut. —Ann Powers

No other album from 2023 is as intoxicatingly atmospheric as PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying. The tenth solo album from the shape-shifting English artist is unlike anything she’s released before—a dark folk concept album whose narrative follows the contours of Harvey’s 2022 epic poem Orlam. The enigmatic, magical realist lyrics are written in a regional English dialect, possessing an arcane quality that’s as heady as it is engrossing. There’s moments of serene wonder (the folky opening tracks) as well as murky unease (see the spectacular, electronica-laden “The Nether-Edge”) that are all modulated with incredible elegance. It’s an abstract and occasionally abstruse album, but also genuinely otherworldly. – TM

On her 10th studio album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, PJ Harvey strives for newness without veering off too far from the familiar. Revisiting her 2022 epic poem Orlam made room for a personal and transformative record, a testament to her genius. All 12 tracks are written in the same rural Dorset vernacular and follow the protagonist’s coming-of-age story, alluding to Harvey’s desire for reinvention. While her captivating poetry remains at the forefront, the backdrop of eerie field recordings and minimalist instrumentation allow for a more tranquil effort; tracks such as “Prayer at the Gate” and “Lownesome Tonight” have gentle tones, while “All Souls” and “A Noiseless Noise” are rather chilling. Yet it still stands strong amongst her previous concept-centric entries, making PJ Harvey’s first proper release in seven years well worth the wait. — Sun Noor

When PJ Harvey, exhausted from touring the ambitious but grim The Hope Six Demolition Project, needed to rekindle her inspiration, she dug deep. Steeped in Dorset folklore, tradition and the archaic dialect, I Inside the Old Year Dying is an excavation into mulchy netherworlds; a work of magic realism, where sexual awakenings merge with the casual brutality of rural life, and a supernatural chill whistles through it all like wind in the telephone wires. “Wordle zircles wider/ With the silence upside down/ Horse atop the rider,” Harvey sings on The Nether-Edge. It could be a legend for an album that is frequently, purposely inscrutable, which thrills in ambiguities, and the spaces in between. —Louise Brailey

This summer, I had the chance to speak with PJ Harvey about “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” her wise and absorbing tenth album, which is also a companion piece, in the broadest sense, to her book “Orlam,” a collection of poems telling the fantastical story of a year in the life of a nine-year old girl named Ira-Abel. Harvey and I talked about the record’s themes of transmutation and renewal, of liminality, of change—she described it as being about “a between-worlds place, poised on thresholds between child and adult, day and night, dream and wakefulness, life and death, across the different seasons and the different months.” She added, “That’s also why the title felt appropriate, ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’—this transformation of both person and year into something else.” It’s almost impossible to capture those moments of reversal, which happen so incrementally that it’s easy to miss them. Harvey does it masterfully here. —Amanda Petrusich