PJ Harvey Announces ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’

The much-awaited ninth studio album by PJ Harvey will be titled The Hope Six Demolition Project. The follow-up to 2011’s Let England Shake will be released by Island on 15 April. It’s the fruit of the work with her collaborators in sessions in front of an audience at Somerset House in London in the Recording In Progress project.

Fans can not only get an audio preview of the album with the long and edited versions of the track ‘The Wheel,’ streaming now on Spotify and available below, but via a video trailer for The Hope Six Demolition Project featuring that song and ‘The Community Of Hope’:

“When I’m writing a song I visualise the entire scene,” says Harvey, who was inspired to write material for the album by visits to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC with filmmaker Seamus Murphy. “I can see the colours, I can tell the time of day, I can sense the mood, I can see the light changing, the shadows moving, everything in that picture.

“Gathering information from secondary sources felt far too removed for what I was trying to write about. I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with.”

Harvey has live dates lined up for early summer including Field Day in London on 12 June, after which she will play numerous shows across Europe.

On a recent interview for BBC One Andrew Marr show, the prolific singer-songwriter discussed her artistic partnership with photographer Seamus Murphy, with whom she first visited troubled regions of Afghanistan and Kosovo before coming to the United States.

“We decided that Washington, DC felt like the right place to go to tie up the ends,” Harvey says. “A lot of the decisions were made there that affected Afghanistan, affected Kosovo, but it was also a nice place to go back. And I, as a writer, was just trying to almost look at the similarities I could find rather than the differences.”

The New Hope Demolition Project can be bought here.

Format: UK English