The current Crack Magazine cover star will release her long-awaited new album I Inside the Old Year Dying next month via Partisan.
Ahead of time, the artist has today (7 June) shared the second single from the project – which was announced in April and serves as her first album in seven years. The new song, I Inside the Old I Dying, is accompanied by an animated visual directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña. Check it out in the player above.
Speaking on the video in a press release, the directors said: “We envisioned the video as a short story about love, death, and resurrection. We imagined that the video can be seen as a little fairytale 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 artefacts and talismans that are part of a ceremony.”
While Harvey described the single itself as a “delicate and beautiful song [that] eluded us until the very last day in the studio”. Continuing, she added: “Over the previous five weeks we had tried so many times to capture it and failed, and/but then John 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.”
The new single arrives alongside the announcement of a UK and European tour taking place later this year. The run of shows will kick off in Dublin on 22 September with later gigs in Glasgow, London and Manchester before she ventures through Europe. Head to her website for further tour details.
I Inside the Old Year Dying next month is out on 7 July. Read the landmark PJ Harvey cover story, penned by Crack’s Editor-in-Chief, Louise Brailey.
