"Femboys in the Forest": PJ Harvey's I Inside the Old Year Dying (Patreon)

In the recent seven year gap between PJ Harvey albums, not many people would have guessed that Harvey’s next studio LP would adapt her nearly 300-page epic of poetry in an obscure English dialect. Anybody who was paying attention knew that there was no way PJ Harvey would do anything else.

I Inside The Old Year Dying is a departure for PJ Harvey, even in a career of constant stylistic changes. It’s her first studio album since her 1991 debut Dry released without the involvement of Island Records, the steadfast international giant of record labels that distributed the majority of her music. Harvey’s long-standing deference to the blues as a musical model is gone, as are her usual adherence to pop song structures or — most importantly — intelligible Modern English.

Last year, Harvey publicized her foray into antiquated language with Orlam, an epic poem about a year in the life of Ira-Abel Rawles, a young girl in Underwhelem, thinly based on PJ Harvey’s home county of Dorset. The poem is written in Dorset’s dialect, a rustic and antiquated rural tongue that’s somewhere between Shakespeare and Hot Fuzz. Orlam is structured by months, chronicling the changing seasons of Underwhelem. It’s a mythological realm where figures like Wyman-Elvis, a hybrid of Christ and Presley, roam like the gods of old. It’s folklore straight out of a life — not unlike Tolkien or Blake in its vividness.

I Inside the Old Year Dying isn’t a straightforward “sung word” record where Harvey sings the poems of Orlam. It wouldn’t be entirely unexpected, given Harvey’s late-career transition to soundtrack composer. Every track on I Inside the Old Year Dying is adapted from a poem in Orlam, using a title and the verses. But Harvey expands each poem with new verses and choruses. She says the songs came together in about three weeks, after years of slow progress on her songwriting — indicating that Orlam was not only a breakthrough for her writing, but as a musician as well.

I Inside the Old Year Dying treats language like a toy. Speaking a new tongue is essentially learning to reprogram one’s brain: you don’t ask yourself “what is a cat?” until you have to explain it in a new language. The result is twisting verse like “femboys in the forest find / figs of foul freedom” or equating spring to the torment of gender with lines like “hark the greening of the eth / curl-ed ferns yet to uncurl / hark the zingen of the birds / gurrel yearns yet to un-gurrel.” It’s an album you should listen to instead of having it explained to you. So go listen to I Inside the Old Year Dying, come back, and finish this review for me. It’s the kind of record you live with for a bit rather than analyzing in print for ages. Hop on Spotify or Apple Music, put on the record, and spend a year with it.