PJ Harvey’s new album is called I Inside The Old Year Dying, and we’re lucky enough to have the title track released today.

Harvey describes it as a “delicate and beautiful song eluded us until the very last day in the studio”.

“Over the previous five weeks we had tried so many times to capture it and failed, and/but then John reinvented the feel of the guitar pattern… As he was demonstrating it in the control room, Flood handed me a microphone and pressed record whilst I sat next to John trying to work out how to sing to it. The result somehow captures the ethereal and melancholic longing I was looking for.”
She further explained: “In the lyric everyone is waiting for the saviour to reappear – everyone and everything anticipates the arrival of this figure of love and transformation. There is a sense of sexual longing and awakening and of moving from one realm into another – from child to adult, from life to death and the eternal.”

It is aching and beautiful.