There are indeed 13 new PJ Harvey songs and it feels closer to a full musical than just a play with a couple of songs and score (like All About Eve). These are full songs not just instrumentals and musically could fit into any of her post-White Chalk albums (with maybe a little bit of UHH - I definitely hear some Pocket Knife). The lyrics are co-written and often serve as inner-monologues for each character rather than advancing the plot - most of them start as solos and then evolve into full-cast vocal arrangements. There are three musicians on stage throughout and the first half is mostly acoustic guitar (with some piano, percussion and atmospheric ambient bits) with electric guitar arriving in the second half. Lyrically some of it is very Polly, especially themes of water and the sensory experience of grubby Victorian London, quite poetic; but some of the lyrics are a bit more banal to me - I guess because they directly state a character’s emotions and are therefore broader and less ambiguous/complex than the best Polly lyrics. I would say that every song sounds VERY much like a PJ Harvey song - you can 100% hear her singing them all and that’s what I want! None of the cast are “singers” and the vocals are intentionally rough and ready, sounding more like a sung version of natural speech - this works because the songs emerge naturally from the characters rather than breaking you out of the story and announcing themselves as a musical number, if that makes sense? However, because any PJ fan can so clearly imagine her singing them, it’s really hard not to hear what they could be and how much her vocals would add… I would love these recordings to be released by her but I think we are probably going to get a cast album - fair enough but it would be a shame not to basically get a brand new PJ Harvey album out of it! I would say an album like that would be regarded as a minor PJ record just because of the lyrics being a bit compromised and because there is a lot of repetition of her previous material (teetering on self-parody at moments imo, depending how much mileage you personally get out of repetitive minor-key piano chords, which are wearing a bit thin on me now...) and we all know how she hates to repeat herself!

These are the song titles:
London Song
Embers and Ash
London, My Beautiful
The Burning Boat
Lizzie Alone
Bradley Headstone
Evening
Eugene Alone
The City and The Field
Holloway
Upstream
Deptford Creek
Homecoming

Edited to add names of musicians: Ian Ross - piano and guitars, Alex Lupo - drums, Sarah Anderson - keyboards

In the programme there’s a 3-page feature about the music with interview snippets from Polly, Ian Rickson and Ben Powers - I’ll post these later today.