I INSIDE THE OLD YEAR DYING

PJ Harvey's tenth studio album I Inside the Old Year Dying marks her first release in seven years, following UK #1 album The Hope Six Demolition Project. On this album, which was recorded with long-time creative collaborators John Parish and Flood, PJ Harvey builds a sonic universe somehow located in a space between life's opposites, and between recent history and the ancient past. Scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all of these distinctions ultimately dissolve into something profoundly uplifting and redemptive. PJ Harvey has commanded attention since the start of her career and is the only musician to have been awarded the UK's Mercury Music Prize more than once, winning first in 2001 for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and again in 2011 for Let England Shake. An accomplished poet and visual artist, as well as a musician and songwriter, her work is striking in it's originality: vivid, absorbing and distinct. Since the release of The Hope Six Demolition Project, which went to #1 album in her native UK, she has contributed compositions for stage and screen; most recently for Sharon Horgan's acclaimed Bad Sisters mini-series. Throughout her career, Harvey 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 it's 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.".