PJ Harvey

**English singer, songwriter, and musician PJ Harvey will perform with her new album *I Inside the Old Year Dying* in Prague’s Lucerna Great Hall on 18 and 19 October 2023 at 8 pm.**

*I Inside the Old Year Dying* is PJ Harvey’s tenth album, and her first in seven years. Throughout her career, she has always ensured that each phase of her progress has taken her somewhere new, but her latest music is audacious and original even by her own standards. Full of a sense of a cyclical return to new beginnings, it combines its creative daring with a sense of being open and inviting, in the most fascinating way. The new songs, Harvey says, offer *“a resting space, a solace, a comfort, a balm – which feels timely for the times we’re in.”*

The record’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around The Hope Six Demolition Project in 2017, and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. *“I was quite lost,”* she says. *“I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do: if I wanted to carry on writing albums and playing, or if it was time for a change in my life – ‘OK, I've done this for a long time. Do I want to carry on for the remainder of my life doing the same thing?’”*

The new songs, Harvey says, *“all came out of me in about three weeks”*. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London – lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.

In the album’s liminal world, scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all these distinctions dissolve. *“I'm somewhere where I've not been before,”* Harvey says. *“What's above, what's below, what’s old, what’s new, what's night, what's day? It's all the same, really – and you can enter it and get lost. And that's what I wanted to do with the record, with the songs, with the sound, with everything.”*

This is a big part of the album’s magic. In all those shadows and ambiguities, there is something profoundly uplifting and redemptive, qualities exemplified by the record’s lead-off single, *A Child’s Question, August*. *“I think the album is about searching, looking – the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,”* says Harvey. *“Not that there has to be a message, but the feeling I get from the record is one of love – it’s tinged with sadness and loss, but it’s loving. I think that's what makes it feel so welcoming: so open.”*