Album Review // PJ Harvey // I Inside the Old Year Dying

Partisan Records

4/5 stars

PJ Harvey's tenth studio album blends the lo-fi style of her early recordings with her later use of samples and ambient sounds to create an album that encompasses her 30+ years of making music for the indie music masses into one record. This is a rare album that sounds better when listened to from start to finish — it doesn't have the same impact when listening to it casually in bits and pieces. Nonetheless, there are standout tracks like "Lwonesome Tonight" and "I Inside the Old Year Dying," and album closers "A Child's Question, July" and "A Noiseless Noise" which wrap things up in such an energetic way that it leaves you wanting more. The use of folk melodies with samples gives a modern juxtaposition to lyrics that are emotional and sometimes bleak, which seems to be a comfortable place for the English singer-songwriter. In some ways this album feels like a companion piece to her 2022 book Orlam, which was a lengthy narrative poem telling a coming-of-age tale, and the first publication written in the Dorset dialect for many decades. The samples used in these recordings were field sounds from Dorset — the area that Harvey calls home — adding to the intimacy of the record.