I INSIDE THE OLD YEAR DYING – new album out July 7th

[revenire]

Thanks jesuspolly! I love the new music!

[TheNightingale]

There is a new profile of Polly in Les Inrockuptibles — paywalled and in French, and not really featuring much new information that we haven’t read in other interviews over the years, but there is one interesting passage:

“Ça a été un album très difficile à faire. J’ai mis des années à comprendre comment l’enregistrer, à me demander si je devais persévérer. J’avais au départ enregistré mes morceaux au téléphone, et je ne parvenais pas à les ré-enregistrer. Peut-être n’était-ce pas le bon moment pour cet album ? Mais quelque chose m’y ramenait. Je ne pouvais pas abandonner ces morceaux. Je suis très heureuse d’avoir persévéré.” Elle a failli laisser tomber à plusieurs reprises. Il fallait se convaincre d’aller au bout. “Ça m’a coûté beaucoup d’argent !”, lâche-t-elle en riant.

Translated:

“It was a very difficult album to make. It took me years to figure out how to record it, wondering if I should keep trying. I had originally recorded my songs on the phone, and I was unable to re-record them. Maybe it was not the right time for this album? But something kept bringing me back. I couldn't let go of those songs. I'm very happy that I persevered.” She nearly gave up on several occasions. It took convinction to go all the way. “It cost me a lot of money!”, she laughs.

So it seems the sessions in January 2022 were not the first attempt at recording the album (maybe this 2020 photo taken at Battery Studios comes from an earlier effort?).

[Sebastiano Boina]

PJ is a bit uneasy today

[lepetitlord]

i will stay one these first listen till the album is out, want to listen to the whole thing in one go, i can tell it's going to be easier for me than hope six, usually the more crooked, less mainstream, the more i'm in it

[Sebastiano Boina]

bunch of news today:

-now i know in which song the binaural microphone has been used: a child's question, July.
- apparently Giovanni Ferrario will tour with PJ's band. Mr. Ferrario was part of the PJ Harvey band in "a woman a man walked by", a misterious man, i never talked about him here simply because i couldn't find any substantial interview with him about PJ.
- on the live dates she will perform some of her old songs, "remade" so they can suit this album vibe.

[Orange Monkey]

Full tour band details:
PJ
John Parish
Jean-Marc Butty
Giovanni Ferrario
James Johnston
and show directed by Ian Rickson.
oh, and Polly will be singing and playing guitar (electric and acoustic)

[bruise]

Love the new songs! August is just... magical. A Child's Question, July is weird and totally unexpected, and A Noiseless Noise is a wonderful closing track. I have to say I preferred the latter part of the album, on the spot, but the songs we heard yesterday are already growing on me. This is definitely not an easy-listening album (well, none of them are except for Stories)

[Romario11]

review from NARC magazine

[revenire]

Guardian review:

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying review – a disquieting escape into the wilds of Dorset

Enigmatic and occasionally disturbing, the songwriter adapts her own book of poetry into a rough-edged LP full of potency and atmosphere

The last time the world of music heard from Polly Harvey was more than seven years ago, in the spring of 2016. Brexit had yet to happen, Barack Obama was still president, and the 53-year-old was on a world tour, albeit the kind of tour the late PJ O’Rourke conducted to research his 1988 opus Holidays in Hell, rather than the kind that involves roadies, riders and soundchecks. The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey’s ninth studio album, offered a travelogue of ravaged locations around the globe – Afghanistan, Kosovo, the roughest neighbourhoods of Washington DC – that Harvey had visited in the company of photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy. It was clearly a process that she ultimately found exhausting: by the end of the accompanying run of live shows, she was apparently considering retiring from music entirely.

She didn’t, but after seven years of dabbling in film and television scores and doing whatever it is that Polly Harvey does when she’s not being PJ Harvey (which frankly could be anything from practising diabolism to getting the prosecco in and inviting the girls over for Love Island – few contemporary artists have so successfully drawn a complete veil over their personal lives), she has returned in a very different place. The one similarity between I Inside the Old Year Dying and its predecessor is that it arrives preceded by a book of poetry, Orlam, an alternately disturbing, dream-like and mysterious novel in verse: I Inside the Old Year Dying essentially adapts 12 of its poems for lyrics. They are set very close to home, in Dorset – where Harvey was born and still lives – and written in thick, occasionally archaic local dialect. Orlam came with a glossary, which is useful when listening to the album, although you don’t need it to understand why Harvey might be enthralled by the language she uses, above and beyond simply geographically rooting the songs. Chawly-wist, clodgy, giltcup, reddick, un-gurrel, puxy: these are words that sound great – rich and satisfying in the mouth – even if you don’t know what they mean.

Besides, the glossary won’t help much with the enigmatic plot, involving a girl on the cusp of adolescence, escape into nature, ghostly “chalky children of evermore” and a spectral, Christ-like figure called Wyman-Elvis, whose speech mingles the lyrics of Love Me Tender with Jesus’s teachings from the gospel of John (anyone interested in drawing parallels between Harvey’s work and that of her sometime collaborator Nick Cave might note a link to Cave’s 1985 epic Tupelo, which conflated Presley’s birth with the nativity). Its obscure nature is occasionally slightly frustrating – it would be nice to know what’s going on, because what’s going on sounds fascinating. But rather than puzzling it out – or indeed, rooting through it for inferences of autobiography – it’s probably better to just immerse yourself in the atmosphere the album creates.

I Inside the Old Year Dying is at the opposite end of Harvey’s musical spectrum to the muscular garage rock and massed backing vocals of The Hope Six Demolition Project. The drums and Harvey’s keening vocals are very in your face: the former recorded without reverb, so they appear to be playing directly in front of you; the latter uncorrected, with every sibilant “s” and microphone-popping “p” sound – and indeed the odd bum note – left in, giving a sense of first-take immediacy. Everything else floats somewhere in the middle-distance, a gauzy mass of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, flickers and gusts of feedback, trombone and synthesiser in which individual instruments are often hard to pick out.

The effect is oddly disquieting, the weird mix lending a disturbing, fever-dream edge to the prettiest melodies, as on A Child’s Question, August. Even Seem an I, which moves from unaccompanied folk-ish singing to the kind of tough guitar riff and strident backing vocals Harvey would have turned into something straightforwardly forceful on The Hope Six Demolition Project, sounds weirdly smeared, smothered in electronics that spin out of time with the rest of the track. The album is frequently overlaid with field recordings of children playing, powerlines humming, rivers rushing and wind rattling fences, a cocktail of sounds that evokes the mood of an ominous old public information film.

There are moments where stark images punch through – “I ascend three steps to hell, the school bus heaves up the hill,” she sings on Autumn Term, as potent a description of first-day-at-secondary dread as you could wish for – but, for the most part, I Inside the Old Year Dying is pretty inscrutable. It requires the listener to submit to its immersive world – a world that, frankly, only PJ Harvey would have dreamed of conjuring up in the first place – but that’s not a problem. Like the Dorset woods they describe, I Inside the Old Year Dying is eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/ ... -of-dorset

[revenire]

The Scotsman review:

For a while back there it looked like we had lost PJ Harvey to the realm of poetry, the documentary field trips to Kosovo and Afghanistan which inspired her previous album The Hope Six Demolition Project awakening new ways of writing and the following world tour draining her enthusiasm for music.

Last summer, she made her first Scottish appearance in years – at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, to promote a poetry collection conceived under the mentorship of Don Paterson. But a rekindling of her musical spirit was already underway and her first album in seven years is another creative volte-face, as Harvey switches from the macro concerns of Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project to a micro folk world drawn in archaic language with improvised arrangements and field recording embellishments from longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish.

On I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey uses the extremes of her vocal range – her haunting higher register and an androgynous alto – but it is what she is uttering that is most alluring and unsettling. Did she really just sing “speak your worldle to me” in the falsetto blues of Prayer at the Gate? It transpires that there are many more intriguing wordles where that came from – for example, “tree-tears” are leaves and “nuts” means “joy” (but also “testicles”).

Ancient rubs up against modern – the damsel protagonist of Lwonesome Tonight carries “in her satchel Pepsi fizz” – as Harvey draws on the folklore of her native Dorset and weaves in biblical, historical and Shakespearean references into a woozy bucolic landscape populated by a council of birds and a recurring character called Wyman Elvis (warrior Elvis).

There is plenty to unpick if you wish; alternatively, just follow Harvey in revelling in the sounds of words as much as the meaning and the joys of witchy blues she conjures. The stridently strummed acoustic guitar of the title track is something to hold on to, a breadcrumb trail back to previous work – the ethereal ambience of White Chalk being the closest relative to this intoxicating comeback from an artist always one step ahead.

https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts- ... lt-4202315

[TheNightingale]

Interview in the Guardian tomorrow

[Sebastiano Boina]

thank you for sharing those reviews Revenire, The Scotsman one is decent, but The Guardian one makes my blood boil:

(...) She didn’t, but after seven years of dabbling in film and television scores and doing whatever it is that Polly Harvey does when she’s not being PJ Harvey (which frankly could be anything from practising diabolism to getting the prosecco in and inviting the girls over for Love Island – few contemporary artists have so successfully drawn a complete veil over their personal lives) (...)

ah yes, just because she doesn't share her private business with those crabs (journos) she is surely a Devil- worshipping witch.... i get this is an attempt to crack a joke but, Gosh, it's a bad one. What a vapid article.
let me remind you that The Guardian is the same Journal who didn't have anything to say against a certain actress, M.F. , actually drinking her boyfriend's blood. But you know, said actress is so open with journos about her private business, so it's ok.
Today's rant has ended, apologies.

[bruise]

ah yes, just because she doesn't share her private business with those crabs (journos) she is surely a Devil- worshipping witch.... i get this is an attempt to crack a joke but, Gosh, it's a bad one. What a vapid article.

Totally agree with you! They've been humourously portraying her like that since the beginning of her career, it's so boring now to read the same sinister characterization over and over.

[Romario11]

ah yes, just because she doesn't share her private business with those crabs (journos) she is surely a Devil- worshipping witch.... i get this is an attempt to crack a joke but, Gosh, it's a bad one. What a vapid article.

Totally agree with you! They've been humourously portraying her like that since the beginning of her career, it's so boring now to read the same sinister characterization over and over.

I think you are both overreacting a little bit, even us lot here were somewhat surprised when she revealed she had a computer/ mobile phone!


gurdian interview: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/ ... year-dying

Spoiler! :

She is the only person to have won the Mercury prize twice and is beloved by fans for her constant reinvention. In a rare interview, the musician talks about her wild new album – and what it tells us about the woman behind the myth

Laura Snapes
Sat 1 Jul 2023 07.00 BST
Star power is a rare thing in music today, stripped away by social media overexposure and a heritage industry that trades on former glories. But PJ Harvey has an otherworldly air as she walks into a restaurant at the Barbican in London for one of her first interviews about her music in more than a decade. A thunderstorm has broken the June heatwave, and Harvey, 53, had to shelter under a ledge to keep dry on her way here. Still, Harvey looks pristine in a black vest and tiny black leather shorts, her famous dark hair in soft, shoulder-length curls, a fine gold chain bearing two rings around her neck.

This is Polly Jean Harvey off-duty. As a musician and performer, PJ Harvey rivals David Bowie for reinvention. Her fans can plot the moment they fell for her by era-specific archetypes and sounds: was it the austere bun of her debut, 1992’s Dry? Or perhaps the lurid leopard print of 1993’s Rid of Me? For me, it was the white suit, red lipstick and gleeful strut of This Is Love from 2000’s Mercury prize-winning Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, leering out of MTV2 and suddenly making pop music look wan.


For 30 years, Harvey’s only constant has been her dogged refusal to repeat herself. She set the bar high from day one: she was a budding art student from a farm in rural Dorset, but with her ribald, violent songs about sex and subjugation, the issue of where she had come from felt like another matter entirely. Harvey’s brawny early 90s albums satirised femininity as a burdensome form of drag (though she refused associations with the burgeoning feminist punk scene) and were intended, she said then, “to humiliate myself and make the listener feel uncomfortable”. Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, tells me she found salvation in Harvey’s refusal of dogma. “She said: I am an artist, not a mouthpiece for whatever mercurial musings, sympathy Olympics, cause du jour. She rejected your moral purity for her own ritual obliteration.”

Nor could anyone have guessed then where she was going – Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake saw her acclaimed as a stately war laureate, making nerve-jangling rock from first world war history. It made Harvey the only double Mercury prize winner. In between came haunted trip-hop, petulant punk and spectral balladry. Pinning down Harvey’s own story on those records was a tall order: she’s always defied autobiographical readings, yet none of her music could have been made by anyone else.

I don’t feel I’m a natural musician. I have to really work at it
She opens the window. When we order tea and the waiter apologises that she only has triple-mint, not bog-standard peppermint, I suggest throwing a strop, and discover that Harvey is quick to laugh. Her posture is immaculate. She never gesticulates: the emotion is all given (and later withheld) in her striking features. “That looks like a nice recorder,” she says of my dictaphone. Harvey used one just like it to capture some of the field recordings on her new, beguilingly strange 10th album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, where sounds like demob-happy kids and fizzing power lines are twisted around her pastoral post-punk and heretical hymns. Others came from sound designers she met while making music for theatre. She asked one “for really specific noises, and he had every single one of them!” she enthuses, her Dorset accent worn and comforting. Like what? “Like: ‘Can I have wind blowing through a barbed wire fence in November?’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, here you are!’”


You get the impression she would rather talk about things like this all day. She has grown more enigmatic over the past decade, producing more music for theatre and TV than solo albums; her once-ferocious gigs became precisely choreographed. She is so private that the tiniest scrap of information becomes outsized: she tells me that she loved The White Lotus, hasn’t finished Succession yet, adores soundtracks, and, surprisingly, calls Ricky Gervais a favourite comedian (he just makes her laugh).

I Inside … is Harvey’s latest pivot – an intimate musical setting of 12 poems from her acclaimed 2022 collection Orlam. (Poetry Foundation called it “accomplished and allusive”.) Set in the Dorset woods, it chronicles the year in which her heroine, Ira-Abel, loses her innocence as childhood slips away and the pressures and perils of girlhood intensify. Harvey wrote the poems in an old Dorset dialect that she remembered from her youth (“drisk” is mist; “twanketen”, melancholy; “scratching”, writing). On I Inside … she sings in it, too, in startling, uncanny tones: sometimes naive and girlish, other times sharp and bitter.

It might be Harvey’s slipperiest record, one she describes as a “sonic netherworld”. It sounds like a sort of timeless folk music, I suggest. “I definitely hoped that I could sort of be in every era and no era all at the same time,” says Harvey, pleased by the idea. Given her allergy to repetition, it seems surprising that she revisited Orlam in a different medium. As she’s got older, she explains, “I’ve stopped trying to compartmentalise what I do.” Songs, poems, drawings used to be kept separate. “But now I’m quite comfortable letting them all blur into one.”

Harvey didn’t intend to make a new album: it crept up on her during her daily piano and guitar practice. “I don’t feel I’m a natural musician,” she says. “I have to really work at it.” Sometimes she recited other people’s songs – Nina Simone, the Stranglers – but sometimes she just needed words for a new melody. While writing Orlam, “I’d grab at a poem because it was the easiest thing I had to hand.”

During the pandemic, she took the sketches to her oldest collaborators, musician John Parish and producer Flood. Harvey and Parish started collaborating when she joined his band, Automatic Dlamini, aged 18. “She started giving me tapes of really early songs, and I saw straight away she had a brilliant voice,” Parish recalls. “I asked her to join as soon as she left school.” Flood first produced 1995’s lethal To Bring You My Love, blown away by a demo that others had warned him was “a bit out there”, he says.


Harvey wanted a marriage of manmade and natural sounds. “It was always a bit homemade, and I love that,” she says, beaming. “To get some of those sounds, it really was like four hands each doing different things to ancient equipment that might break at any time. It felt very human and very of the moment.” But they were still prepared to junk everything if it didn’t meet their high standards. It was the eternal challenge, says Harvey: avoiding repetition. “None of us are interested in treading over the same ground, and the more you’ve worked together, the harder that is,” she says. “The more songs I’ve written, it’s harder to write songs because I so often start something and think, well, mm, that’s a bit like that song I wrote in 1996.”

Harvey was also determined to avoid what they called her “PJ Harvey voice”. It echoes a scribble in the liner notes to 2004’s barbed, beautiful Uh Huh Her, in which she questioned: “too PJ H?” (As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine how anything could be “too PJ H”.) Harvey describes it as “a particular way of projecting my voice – even down to that. Flood would stop me straight away if he heard me singing in a way I’d sung before, and help me find emotional ways to access a different voice.” (Flood insists he wouldn’t dare: “I might get the withering eyebrow.”)

Doesn’t trying not to sound like PJ Harvey ever lead to an identity crisis? “It does,” she admits. “I definitely go through times where I wonder if I still have the ability to write the songs I dream of writing. Am I still any good? Have I still got it? But I’ll keep having a go. And usually, if I persevere, I can get there.” Sometimes it feels like “climbing uphill through mud”, even in pursuit of songs she knows aren’t good enough. “In some ways, I’d be a bit scared if I lost that doubt because then I would maybe feel a bit too comfortable, and not really be able to see clearly what I’m doing any more.”

The creation of Harvey’s previous album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, was an uphill slog through mud. Having reflected on historic atrocities with Let England Shake, The Hope Six focused on modern foreign and domestic policy. Harvey’s reportage-style lyrics drew from research trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC. She offered unprecedented access into its creation, setting up a studio in Somerset House in London for the public to watch her record through one-way glass, and also published an accompanying poetry book, The Hollow of the Hand. Yet she never talked about the intentions behind these works. “I wanted to leave everything that I had to say within the lyrics, and not have to put them inside some sort of framework,” she says now.

Harvey was accused of poverty tourism, with DC councillors vociferously criticising one song for portraying a deprived neighbourhood as “drug town, just zombies”. (“PJ Harvey is to music what Piers Morgan is to cable news,” said one.) It’s easily Harvey’s least beloved record but – she says, becoming terse – she “didn’t pay too much attention to the response”. She doesn’t read reviews because she doesn’t find it healthy (she once said reading all her early press contributed to a period of mental ill health). “Bottom line,” she says, “I know how I feel about it.” Did the politicians’ comments make her question her intentions? No. “Everyone’s entitled to a different opinion.”


But on a gruelling year-long tour for the album, Harvey developed a different kind of dissatisfaction. “I was very tired, then remembered how tired I’d been writing,” she says, warming again. She was in her late 40s, “a natural time of questioning: is this still what I want to be doing?” Sometimes, during the shows, “I felt as though I was watching myself from a distance ‘performing’ my work, trying to unravel who and what I was at that moment in my life.” After the tour, she took time off, even stopping her daily practising. Her enthusiasm was revived by being asked to do soundtracks by theatre director Ian Rickson, and TV showrunners Sharon Horgan and Shane Meadows. “That was a way I could really enjoy music without it having to become a Polly Harvey album.”

Poetry was another salvation. Harvey began a formal mentorship with the Scottish poet Don Paterson. Their first lesson was at her house. “I was so excited and nervous, there with my notepad and pen,” she remembers. “And Don said, ‘Right, I thought today we won’t do any theory. We’re just going to talk about why you want to write poetry.’ That was it!” She gulps with trepidation. Three hours of probing later, she had cast back to herself as a tiny child, writing and drawing under a tree in woods near her house, and was in tears. “I seemed to have been completely regressed to a child of five weeping under a fir tree at the bottom of the garden!”

Paterson told her: write about that. Harvey wasn’t sure; The Hollow of the Hand had been a journalistic endeavour. “Don encouraged me to be as bold in my poetry as I am in my songs, which I hadn’t done,” she says. “I’d felt a bit like I was not worthy to write poetry, so I trod very carefully around it.” Poets are her greatest inspiration, she explains later by email. “There seems to be a magic and magnificence in their words that conjure the very meaning of life. To even begin to try and enter that world felt a goal beyond my capability.”

Harvey also took poetry courses in London, and claims no one recognised her. “If you’re going about your life like a normal person, people only see what you’re there to do,” she says. She loved being a student “because I always felt a bit sad that I missed out on going on to further learning”. In the early 90s, Harvey turned down studying sculpture at St Martin’s College to pursue music: “I’d often feel what fun that would have been, to have had those three years with a similar age group, finding out who you are. It was a bit like going back to do that study that I’d never done. You’d often be encouraged to share really new writing, which puts you in a vulnerable position, but it’s the same for everyone. That was a beautiful thing.”

Harvey’s fans know how fiercely she rejects autobiographical interpretations of her work. Though she also welcomed the misconceptions as they only made her more elusive – if people want to assume from 1995’s Down By the Water that she drowned her daughter, let them. Other records were clearly more personal – she paused the writing of 1998’s Is This Desire? when penning one song made her realise that she was unwell and needed to get help – although given the ghoulish 90s coverage of her few spells of mental ill health, you can understand why she’d rather conceal the links between her life and music.

But there are startling things in common between the protagonist of her new songs and poems and the young Harvey. Both are farm girls who cropped their hair and exclusively befriended boys. Ira-Abel describes herself as a “not-girl, a bogus boy”; as a child, Harvey loathed girlhood, went by the name Paul and peed standing up to fit in. I try to draw what seem like clear lines between them, but Harvey stridently resists. Harvey once said she became shy at 11 – was that a similar loss of innocence? No, she says – besides, she can’t remember saying that and surely everyone goes through it. Did her brother cut her hair, as Ira-Abel’s does? “Like I said, it’s not an autobiographical work,” she says. (Though one associate lets slip that it’s “kind of like an origin story, autobiographical but oblique”, then tells me, “Don’t dob me in!”)


I try to widen the conversation to what seem like timely themes in the work, but it proves just as fruitless. Harvey becomes impassive and I start to sweat in her cool gaze. Ira’s frustrations with gender seem resonant with contemporary conversations about identity. Was that on her mind? “No, no.”

I get very affected by things on a daily basis that we hear are happening in the world
Her last three albums all consider the human capacity for cruelty. What keeps bringing her back to that theme? “I wouldn’t say they’re just that,” she says. “There’s also a lot of looking at positivity and love. You can only look at that with the other side. Then that is really an exploration of how it feels to be alive.”

She’s said that she can become grievously upset by current events: is it a strike against terrible things being normalised, or her innate empathy? “I’m naturally like that,” she says. “I get very affected and upset by things on a daily basis that we hear are happening in the world, then feel the need to write about it.” The government plans to house refugees in a barge off the coast near where Harvey grew up. Are there local movements against it? She thinks so. “I think it’s really difficult for everyone in that area for all sorts of different reasons, isn’t it?” Does she have an opinion? “I do, but I’m not going to talk about that,” she says. Defeated by her stonewalling, I move on.

IInside … is the latest iteration of Harvey’s need to remove herself from her work. As a younger woman, she achieved it through self-destruction; this album feels as though she’s trying to attain it through transcendence. She doesn’t often listen back to her albums, she says, but calls this one a comfort. “It always makes me feel better.”

A recent lavish reissue campaign of all her albums traces how Polly Jean Harvey became PJ Harvey, though Harvey says the release was just a practical matter: many of her albums were out of print on vinyl. The idea grew to include old demos and rarities. “It’s been a lovely project for me, and for me to have,” she says. “It’s made it much easier to reference things while I’m looking for something.” (I imagine her putting on 2007’s White Chalk to confirm her suspicions that yes, she’s used that voice before.)

One of the best parts, I thought, was the archival photos: a goth in hot weather reading Flannery O’Connor; looking uncertain at college; the tender Polaroid of her and lover Nick Cave in a collage she made for him in the mid-90s (last year Cave described them as “each too self-absorbed to ever be able to inhabit the same space in any truly meaningful way”). I wondered how she felt looking at them – who she felt close to, distant from? “I didn’t feel any of those things, no,” she says, perplexed.

I ask why she wanted to shock people when she first emerged. She can’t remember, then stops me. “If I was to keep asking you what you meant when you wrote that line, where were you at, wouldn’t you find it a bit odd?” she probes. No, I say – old photos give me enormous nostalgia. I love hearing artists reflect on their career. And I had imagined that doing a retrospective must be poignant. I find myself apologising, flustered. “I’m just curious,” she says gently. “I’m not even critical. It does interest me because a lot of people want to know about those things, but I guess I’m just not that type of person.”

Harvey lives in the moment, she says. “Not even that far in the future – only in terms of creative ideas I’m slowly growing.” Her past selves feel a healthy distance away, though she won’t perform some songs from Dry any more. She was 17 when she wrote it. “I’m too far away from that as a 53-year-old woman.” She’s always written from the perspective of various characters – why is this different? “It’d be like you reading from your diary aged 16 and really having to inhabit that now – like on that funny radio programme [Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary], which I love. It’s hilarious. But hilarity is not what we’re after.” I assume she would never write a memoir. “I wouldn’t, really,” she says. “I’ve seen some beautiful films made as people reach their older years,” she says, mentioning Nina Simone: La Légende from 1992. “Maybe when I can see my end in sight, I maybe, might do a film,” she says.

Perhaps it’s Harvey’s refusal to look back that imbues her work with a potency which means fans can plot their lives by it. Sharon Horgan recently asked Harvey to score her Bafta-winning drama series Bad Sisters. She discovered her when she moved from Ireland to London in the late 90s, initially falling for the “raw, primal” To Bring You My Love. “That might have suited where I was at the time, feeling angry,” says Horgan. Soon the slicker Stories From the City … came to define Horgan’s experience. “It’s how she talks about being in love. It felt like you were able to learn a lot about putting your feelings in order when you listen to that album.”

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Harvey is happy to have a foot in the past, in some respects. Music consumption has changed a lot even since her previous album. She worries about how music is valued, even by herself. “If I don’t like it after a minute, I might go to something else, and I keep pulling myself back on that: Polly! Just sit and listen!” she says. As a songwriter who emerged decades before streaming, she was “lucky enough to have had a good grounding when things weren’t like that. I’ve been able to grow confidence in my process. But I wonder how it affects the younger generation that is having to write in this new climate?”

She’s been listening to conversations about AI and creativity. “But,” she says with a rhapsodic sigh, “I can’t imagine that the imperfection of the human touch will be outridden by the perfection of a computer. I think there’s something beautiful about imperfections and failings of us as human beings.” She comes back to the making of I Inside … “I believe that people will still want that homemade-ness of it – going full circle to us holding things together with bits of tape to make a sound.”

For one night only on New Year’s Eve 1991, Harvey, Parish and some others formed an Abba tribute band, Fabba. Has she seen Abba Voyage? “I didn’t, but I would be interested to,” she says. “I’ve heard brilliant reports. I think that’s going to become more and more common though, don’t you?” she says of the reanimating technology. “I mean, oh gosh,” she adds, with a grimace, “the other day I did entertain whether they’re gonna make a PJ Harvey avatar when I’m dead and gone!” She hoots. Maybe they could call it the Pologram, I suggest. Finally, I have found the limit of Harvey’s desire to keep moving forward. “Oh no!” she cries happily, head in hands, “please, no!”

[TheNightingale]

IDK, I thought the Guardian review was decent — and did a very good job of describing the album’s sound and obliqueness. A jokey comment about PJ being a witch or sth is maybe a bit tired at this point but expected, it’s like calling Björk an alien; more of a jab at the oversized stage persona that’s grown around them over the years than anything to be taken so seriously.

I think you are both overreacting a little bit, even us lot here were somewhat surprised when she revealed she had a computer/ mobile phone!

Agree! Speaking of the Guardian, I think today’s interview is the first time I read about Polly following-up via email afterwards. Which of course is a usual/common practice and surely must have happened in the past, too — the fact that it feels so weird is a testament to how warped the perception of her is, even by her longtime fans.

BTW Laura Snapes is a great music writer and she wrote a personal essay for NPR about Uh Huh Her in the past. PJH unfortunately comes off in the new interview as tight-lipped as usual whenever she’s asked about anything other than what’s in the album press release, but at least it’s nice to learn she watches The White Lotus and Succession, and is as guilty of a shattered attention span caused by music streaming as everyone else lol

I also think this photo is new?

Spoiler! :