Patrick Wolf has announced details of his long-awaited new album. Called Crying The Neck, it will be released via Apport and Virgin Music, and is preceded by the single ‘Dies Irae’, which you can listen to below. The album, the first in a planned series of four records, is inspired by Wolf’s surroundings in his new home of East Kent as the background to recovery from addiction and the death of his mother from cancer. Shaped by a pagan wheel of the year, and various Kentish rituals around the harvest, Wolf says that the album uses folklore to investigate themes of grief and survival.
Crying The Neck was written, arranged and largely produced by Wolf himself, using instruments that were core to his early work on the albums Lycanthropy and Wind In The Wires, including the viola, the Appalachian dulcimer, baritone ukulele, kantale, and Atari.
“Exploration of folklore can just be listing the ritual, and it’s very rare that people go deeper and ask, ‘well, what did it mean?’ Wolf has said. He describes the hooden horse ritual, for instance as “a beautiful metaphor of grief and how somebody gets resurrected within your life, that they do actually come back with magic powers, they become a supernatural guide.”
‘Dies Irae’ is one of a suit of songs on the album written about the death of his mother from cancer. Taken from the Latin Requiem Mass, it was written as “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. 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.” You can pre-order Crying The Neck here.
