Seven years ago, the last PJ Harvey album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, took Polly Harvey out into the world. A hybrid of art installation (the public could pay to watch the recording process through a one-way mirror at Somerset House), poetry (a book of poems by Harvey and photographs by Seamus Murphy was published at the same time) and journalistic reportage (the pair visited Kosovo, Afghanistan and a deprived part of Washington DC to inspire their work), it angered American politicians and exhausted Harvey, finding her ending a year-long world tour wondering if she even wanted to carry on making albums. “I can’t express how heartbroken I felt,” she has said.
Eventually, she found her way back, partly by spending time working on music that demanded less of her personally. She did TV soundtrack work for both Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters and Shane Meadows’ The Virtues. Then the door to this album was finally opened by writing more poetry. Despite years of lyric writing experience, she took a humble approach to learning, working with the Scottish poet Don Paterson as a formal mentor.
