Seven years ago, the last PJ Harvey album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, took Polly Harvey out into the world. A hybrid of art installation (the public could pay to watch the recording process through a one-way mirror at Somerset House), poetry (a book of poems by Harvey and photographs by Seamus Murphy was published at the same time) and journalistic reportage (the pair visited Kosovo, Afghanistan and a deprived part of Washington DC to inspire their work), it angered American politicians and exhausted Harvey, finding her ending a year-long world tour wondering if she even wanted to carry on making albums. “I can’t express how heartbroken I felt,” she has said.
Eventually, she found her way back, partly by spending time working on music that demanded less of her personally. She did TV soundtrack work for both Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters and Shane Meadows’ The Virtues. Then the door to this album was finally opened by writing more poetry. Despite years of lyric writing experience, she took a humble approach to learning, working with the Scottish poet Don Paterson as a formal mentor.
Instead of immersing herself again in war and conflict, as she also did on her Mercury Prize-winning 2011 album Let England Shake, she dug deep into the earth of her West Country childhood. The result was Orlam, a book of magic realist poems set in darkest Dorset, published last year. Many of its gnarled, mossy lines also find their way into these 12 songs, in fertile language that makes the acoustic title track in particular, with its “frogs and toads in lagwood holes”, sound as ancient as a churchyard yew.
The dialect can make for a confusing experience, especially when she deliberately pierces the folky fog with references to “Pepsi fizz” on Lwonesome Tonight, and frequent quoting of Elvis Presley lyrics. The spectral groove of The Nether-edge lifts a line from Hamlet but also depicts “Femboys in the forest”. Sometimes the mood shifts accidentally, too. I was wondering why she kept singing about the popular online guessing game Wordle until I learned it’s old Dorset for “world”.
Otherwise, this is a wonderfully immersive experience, the music stripped back to a skeletal state that recalls Nick Cave’s recent work, and leaving plenty of space for Harvey to sing in a ghostly keen that feels new for her. Her vision of old England is a vivid, spellbinding one.
