UK music icon PJ Harvey has announced her tenth studio album, I Inside The Old Year Dying, is on its way.

Harvey leads the album with a new song and video, A Child’s Question, August. The new album – Harvey’s first since 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project – will be released on July 7.

Harvey says I Inside the Old Year Dying’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how she felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realisation that was troubling beyond words.

When Harvey began to write new songs, she says there was a liberating sense of making music for its own sake, rather than the first steps back into the album-tour-album-tour cycle.

She drew on the sense of creative freedom she had felt in past musical work on soundtracks, and in the theater. At the same time, her perspective was shifting, away from the big themes of Let England Shake and Hope Six (“looking out, at war, politics, the world”), towards something more intimate and human.

Harvey released her debut album Dry in 1992, and followed up with the instant classic Rid of Me, laying the foundations for her future as an icon of rock.

A Child’s Question, August is out now.

Image: Steve Gullick, featured image: PJ Harvey Live In France (2004) DVD cover

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