I Inside the Old Year Dying – PJ Harvey ★★★★

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2023	I Inside the Old Year Dying	PJ Harvey	★★★★	83	Rock	Folk

An innovative voice in indie music for more than 30 years, PJ Harvey’s  2023 release I Inside the Old Year Dying is an album that’s equally beautiful, captivating and disorienting. 

Listening to the album feels like you’re lost in a fog while wandering alone through the mountains on horseback. It’s almost as if you’re in a dreamlike state at times, with a constant undercurrent of nervousness and vulnerability. 

The album sets PJ Harvey’s book of poetry, Orlam, to music. The book, and the lyrics it creates, is written in a Dorset dialect, which pays homage to her time growing up in South West England. The uncommon vernacular and troubadour instrumentation makes the album feel almost like it’s from Medieval times, or made up of old-world Pagan stories. The phrasing and unfamiliar inflections create a surreal experience, especially when combined with her sporadic vocal performance.

Musically, every song is enthralling without having more than an ounce or two of upbeat energy to it. Harvey, her vocals and her guitar are always in the spotlight, and the album’s producers, Flood (backing synth work and loops) and John Parish (subtle but always present percussion), do a great job of adding textures without ever being noticed.

The opener, “Prayer at the Gate,” sets the album’s tone perfectly, with creepy atmospheric synths in the distance, guitar reverb buzzing in and out of focus, and the subtlest of drum beats beneath her raw vocals that are performed more in the spirit of trip-hop than rock music.  

The majority of the record, though, is folk and acoustic influenced, with hints of eerie ambient noises and rumbles in the distance, like a storm slowly rolling to shore, with an occasional crackle of thunder here and there — like the fierce (and brief) title track and the tormented  closing track “A Noiseless Noise.”