The double Mercury Prize-winning PJ Harvey has a reputation for making “difficult” music. When I tell a friend I’m reviewing her latest, he sympathises with the “chore” I have ahead, noting that Harvey’s new weirdy-witchy, rural-childhood-in-Dorset-themed album “sounds like it should have been the background to that Bridget Christie sitcom about spooky villagers”. This observation does make me smile occasionally as I listen to I Inside the Old Year Dying – particularly when Harvey dirge-repeats a line about “the chalky children of evermore” on the title track, like a woman in an ITV crime drama cult. But I’m also quite susceptible to a bit of earthy folk grunge, and to Harvey’s slippery melodic hooks, which twist cool and deep like underground streams.
After the outward-looking war reportage of 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, I Inside… finds 53-year-old Harvey turning inward. Returning to the farm-girl childhood, which so obsessed the music press when she first began making music under her own name in the early 1990s. Although perm-wary of nostalgia, Harvey recently found herself gravitating to her origins on the former iron age hill fort after taking poetry lessons with 59-year-old Scottish poet Don Paterson (who published his own boyhood memoir this year). And although she refuses to acknowledge any autobiographical inspiration, in 2022 Harvey published a collection of narrative poems titled Orlam. They used 19th-century Dorset dialect and followed the emotional rise and fall of the Southern English landscape.
