Patrick Wolf has announced the release of his long-awaited seventh album Crying The Neck due out 25th April via Apport / Virgin Music and available to pre-order here. The album features guest appearances from Zola Jesus, Serafina Steer, drummer Seb Rochford and Wolf’s sister Jo Apps. Alongside news of an extensive UK, European and US tour, the dates of which are listed below, Wolf has shared first single ‘Dies Irae‘, an anthemic “affirmation of life” set in the days before the passing of his mother. Watch the video below.
A vibrant widescreen, journey through the undergrowth replete with sweeping strings, and punctuating percussion, ‘Dies Irae’ swoops and whips up into an invigorating and awe-inspiring chorus, that was conceived in the shadow of oncoming grief but also inhabits the empowering feeling it shifted in him, that you have to embrace life before its too late. ‘Dies IRAE’ comes from the Latin Requiem Mass and translates to “the day of wrath” or, as Wolf puts it, “the day of separation from the living”.
He wanted to write a response to that idea, seeing it instead as a “an affirmation of life in the last days of knowing you are about to lose someone you love, and a courageous – almost rebellious – choice against the misery to use the time remaining to deepen your love or joy with each other.” He wrote it “to give myself another day I didn’t have with my mother during her rapid descent in illness” and hopes that this might also help others who have been through the same process. The string arrangement at the end of the song is based on the Medieval Gregorian chant ‘Dies Irae’ from the Latin mass. The song, Wolf says, completed the narrative arc of the album, connecting the opening tracks with the “death suite” of pieces in tribute to his mother. “I finished the lyrics as an imaginary last conversation with my mother in her art studio and out to the garden as the evening falls,” he says. “My sister Jo Apps came in the last days of mixing to sing the backing vocals, and in a way, it meant that we could both share a last dance in the kitchen with our ma together.”
The aftermath of addiction, crisis, bankruptcy, recovery and survival shaped The Night Safari, Patrick Wolf’s 2023 return to music after ten years lost to creative impasse and personal upheaval. Now, with seventh studio album Crying The Neck, the 41-year-old has created a confident and hopeful record inspired by the transfiguring power of grief at the death of his mother, rehabilitation, local folklore and the East Kentish landscape.
Crying The Neck, his first new album in thirteen years and the first in a planned four album series,was written and recorded in the Kent coastal town of Ramsgate that Wolf now calls home. Here, he has a peaceful studio in the garden, the place in which he was able to find his voice again. In a period of rebuilding, Crying The Neck was entirely written, composed, produced and arranged by Wolf himself, with Brendan Cox brought in as co-producer and engineer in the last three years to help finish an album a decade in the making.
In this quiet space,Wolf went back to the origins of his music making, taking inspiration from the techniques and tools he had at the time, and thus was able to move forward. He wanted to return to instruments including the viola, the Appalachian dulcimer, baritone ukulele, kantale, and the Atari he used to programme as a teenager, with a spirit of “let’s go really into all the things I’ve returned to with my hands and use the muscle memory to develop my craft.”
As well as Crying The Neck being fixed in the Kentish landscape, there’s a temporal specificity, related to folklore, that also involved deep research. The planned four album cycle will follow the seasons as set out by a pagan wheel of the year, bought in a Rochester print shop. Consulting the wheel, Wolf realized that the events that he was writing about all came within the Lúnasa and Mabon sections of the wheel – July, August and September, the time of fruitfulness and harvest. The passing of Wolf’s mother Imelda Apps from angiosarcoma cancer in 2018 happened then, just a week from her birthday, and shapes what he describes as a “death suite of songs” that are the core of the record, as well as providing the title. When Wolf first encountered the phrase “crying the neck”, he interpreted it as being “the primal cry that you make in grief”. It turned out that it was a harvest ritual chant uttered when the final neck of corn is cut, traditionally associated with the West Country, but also followed in East Kent. His mother’s passing around the time of the ritual provided the connection of harvest as a metaphor for death and started to appear more frequently in his writing.
Crying The Neck weaves these intensely personal songs with events Wolf saw around him in East Kent. He found it jarring that this place that “gave me a lot of sense of wonder and overwhelming beauty” was often discussed in terms of various crises – a border crisis, an economic crisis or a migrant crisis. Then an incident that inspired the completion of ‘Hymn Of The Haar’ came one morning at a favourite remote swimming and writing spot, where Wolf saw the body of a migrant drowned the night before. “It was harrowing, just me and this boy all morning, I had thought they were asleep in the sun for hours as I wrote” he recalls, “the next day, there was nothing, no mention in the press, the body was just taken away. It was like this ghost. I saw the arrival and disposal of his existence as being incredibly dehumanizing”. Yet to Patrick the negativity that surrounded national perceptions of East Kent wasn’t the whole picture, and he felt a duty to paint a more nuanced and positive portrait of the area that he had fallen in love with, highlighting the beauty found in its landscape, people and folklore. ‘The Last Of England’, named after the film Derek Jarman shot on the shingle of Dungeness is, while not a political song, “a national anthem that I wrote for myself – England is beautiful and rotten at the same time, and I am a part of it.”
The complexity of nationhood, personhood and grief that Crying The Neck embraces is summed up by the appearance on the album of a the recording of the writer Vita Sackville-West reading the line “faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair”, from her poem ‘The Land’. “The quote is important because it’s acceptance and acknowledgement,” says Wolf. Crying The Neck finishes on the Foreland peninsula, looking out over the North Sea, reflecting on the transience of life, but also progress. “I wanted a song of experience at the end, a preparation for a shift into a more urgent mortality,” Patrick Wolf explains. “I do feel like I have a certain amount of time left, to do the work that I want to do, and a certain amount of time left to not do the work as well, and to live.”
UK & EU Tour:
Thursday 8 May – Manchester – Gorilla
Saturday 10 May – Gateshead – The Glasshouse
Sunday 11 May – Glasgow – St Luke’s
Tuesday 13 May – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
Thursday 15 May – London – HERE at Outernet
Friday 16 May – Bristol – The Lantern
Tuesday 20 May – Cologne – Gebaude 9
Wednesday 21 May – Hamburg – Grunspan
Thursday 22 May – Leipzig – UT Connewitz
Friday 23 May – Berlin – Heimathafen
Saturday 24 May – Warsaw – Niebo
Monday 26 May – Ghent – Club Wintercircus
Tuesday 27 May – Amerstam – Tolhuistuin
Wednesday 28 May – Paris – Trabendo
Thursday 29 May – Zurich – Dynamo
Saturday 31 May – Milan – Santeria Toscana 31
Sunday 1 June – Bologna – Locomotiv
Tuesday 3 June – Munich – Ampere
Wednesday 4 June – Prague – Lucerna Music Bar
Friday 6 June – Vienna – Theater Akzent
Photo credit: Furmaan Ahmed
