One of the upsides of your parents getting older is they get more and more interested in legacy and finding out about their own ancestry. When death is coming down the garden path, there’s reassurance in being reminded that we are all connected to something bigger and longer-lasting than our rather fickle individual lifespans.

As it happens, over the weekend I was looking over my family tree, which in recent years was updated significantly by my uncle to go back as far as the 1700s, where to my surprise, my father’s side remained firmly planted on the Dorset/Somerset border for a good 3-4 generations until the Industrial Revolution uprooted most rural communities and displaced them into the dark Satanic mills of modern urban life.

So it seems strangely fortuitous that I’ve also been spending time with PJ Harvey’s recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying. It’s built from the poems in her book Orlam, and those poems are laced with archaic Dorset dialect (or something very close to it). Words like lwonesome, meesh, or the deliciously strange gurrel yearns yet to un-girl feel as if dug up from some waterlogged rural glossary dredged up from the bottom of lake. They’re recognisable enough that we almost understand them, but skewed just beyond easy grasp.

That’s part of why a song like ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ feels uncanny. It doesn’t sound like a folk relic carefully preserved from the past, but more like a message smuggled forward—as though survivors from some future England had stitched together fragments of Old English, scraps of hymnals, and Elvis records into a new liturgy. Harvey is, in effect, creating a kind of future-medieval tongue, a hybrid language that produces a time-slip sensation, an impression of a parallel England from another part of the multiverse.

This dialectal texture reminds me strongly of The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth or Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, which work in a similar space, both works that collapse the distance between older, archaic speech forms and imaginative re-invention, where reading is a kind of translation, a trying to a remember an almost forgotten language buried somewhere at the back of our collective unconscious. Listening to Harvey intone about the ‘zingen of the birds', we feel a strange gravity pulling us in – this is English, but something older, less succinct, more layered, haunted and storiated with the debris of history.

Interestingly, Harvey herself says that although she knew some dialect words from childhood, she had to actively learn and study them. She also remarks that she wants the work to be open, that listeners from outside Dorset might “bring their own landscape in.” 

Harvey’s lyrical blending of Christian, Elvis/King, and earthy imagery here feels like she’s further rummaging through cultural strata to find meaning in the cracks, in particular, the ever-blurring boundaries between divine worship and secular devotion. That feels relevant now, when traditional religious beliefs such as the Russian Orthodox Church, and ‘trad wife’ style Christianity are being re-adopted in some sections of society, as our yearning for meaning persists and struggles to find more persuasive outlets.

In an era of late capitalism, when the present feels brittle, we are often therefore reaching behind us for stories and voices older and stranger for a path forward, or at the very least, a safe haven. We too, much like our ancestors, are living in another of those ‘big shift’ moments when local identities are felt threatened and being strongly reasserted, sometimes by reactionary forces, sometimes by artists. Harvey has been blending English myths with dialect, songwriting, poetry and storytelling for many years as an act of quiet resistance: a reclaiming of rootedness, of voice, of place. A song like ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ doesn’t offer a manifesto necessarily – it’s far too oblique for that – but it does offer us a shaded space to lean into mystery, to unpick how devotion and meaning might again form in an age of unravelling.

Enjoye jur Sundaes,

Will