has conjured a realist frightful neverland. The rural countryside has been a frequent muse across Harvey’s career, but her tenth album goes further than ever: the songs are based on her 2022 narrative poetry book, written in the Dorset dialect of her youth, telling the pre-adolescent story of Ira-Abe Rawles, a young child from Underwhelm, a fictional village equally dream-like and disquieting.
Harvey presented the album in full on her second night at London’s Roundhouse in an extraordinary show of artistry and imagination. Opener “Prayer at the Gate” established the eerie scene: with the simple stage set that saw a church pew and some wooden chairs overlooked by cracked black skyline, Harvey embellished the song’s slow marching drums and distant synths with striking poses.
The rendition of the album worked especially well given the backdrop of Harvey’s unknowability. The air of enigma she has cultivated since the late 1990s – even in the instance of, she reveals next to nothing; her sole utterance all night came 90 minutes in when she introduced the band and thanked the crowd – means that not only can she fully inhabit a world of her own creation, but it is totally believable.
It was a potent, dynamic display. Still able to summon her early intensity, Harvey easily switched between the starkness of “Angelene” and “The Garden” and her earliest grunge-era material that the band attacked full-throttle: “Man-Size” and “Dress”, with their fluid, ahead-of-their-time enigmatic themes of early womanhood, play out as tales to heed.
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