Feeling the Sting of Time with PJ Harvey

Since 1992, when she released “Dry,” her début album, PJ Harvey has made complex music that channels a primal, earthly energy. For me, her work has always conjured images of the natural world, a certain rawness and danger: a prehistoric volcano rupturing, or a big cat darting elegantly across a plain. Earlier this month, Harvey released “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” her tenth album, and her first since 2016. It’s based loosely on “Orlam,” Harvey’s second book of poetry, which was published in 2022 and written in the heavy, captivating vernacular of Dorset, the coastal county in southwest England where Harvey was brought up. Both the poems and the album lyrics require some footnotes for a lay reader to untangle, but Harvey’s sense of rhythm and scene are so exquisite that it hardly feels like work at all.