Patrick Wolf shares new single and video "Limbo" featuring Zola Jesus from upcoming album "Crying The Neck" out 13th June via Apport / Virgin Music || Announces Autumn US + Canada tour
Patrick Wolf returns with his much-anticipated new album Crying The Neck due out 13th June via Apport / Virgin Music. Following lead track “Dies Irae”, today Wolf shares second single and LP highlight “Limbo”, an anthemic duet which features guest vocals from the inimitable Zola Jesus. Watch the video HERE.
Additionally, Wolf has announced news of a US & Canada tour running throughout Sept/Oct/Nov to follow his UK & EU shows in May and June. All live dates are listed below.
Commenting on “Limbo” Patrick Wolf says: “I first started imagining a limbo - or purgatory - to set a song in after seeing a painting ‘The Scapegoat’ by William Holman Hunt in the Manchester art gallery. Years later on bleak lockdown weekly food drives to Bromley and the arguments and tensions in a relationship that brewed in the claustrophobia of the car made me want to begin writing a duet about the realism of a couple cutting off each other’s sentences and debating whether to persist with or escape each other. I reset the song to a strip of road in Thanet where I live with the couple now fugitive from the shadow of a country on the brink of war and with the painting from the Manchester gallery in my head, the land unfurled to the purgatory of the scapegoat and the rainbow, which I have our couple pulling up to as a roadside inn for the night in the song. So much of Crying The Neck is a series of responses to decay, death or loss, this song is the lovers’ response to a relationship in limbo and the only song on the album about a romantic relationship. I have adored Zola’s work since her first ‘Stridulum’ album and we have been pen friends since 2011. As I finished writing the song here by the quiet of the sea and seeing pictures of her own wilderness of woodland where she lives now in Wisconsin, I felt we were aligned somewhat in spirit at this point of our work. It was only her voice I imagined to duet with me and now I can’t imagine anyone else riding shotgun beside me on this our summer gothic road trip of a song.”
Credits: Zola Jesus: Vocals // Patrick Wolf: Vocals, Viola, Baby Grand Piano Synth, Bass + Drum Programming, Acoustic Guitar, Banjolele, Empathy Generator // Brendan Cox: 12-String Guitar, Bass Guitar // Seb Rochford: Drums + Percussion // Written, Produced and Arranged by Patrick Wolf // Co-produced, Engineered and Mixed by Brendan Cox
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.”
Yet this is the first Patrick Wolf record that doesn’t travel back, or yearn for, a state of boyhood. Instead, Wolf revisited some of his earliest unreleased material to recontextualise it for his present. Album opener ‘Reculver’ is a song that Wolf began to write when he was just 16. He’d always wanted to finish it, and when he started looking for houses in Kent and passing the Reculver towers on the way there and back to London, the song kept demanding to be relocated there. The beats on the fresh incarnation of the song, the start of Wolf’s new future, are the very ones he made back then.
The Reculver towers were on a list of words, landmarks, people and local places that had to be on the album. This geographic specificity is an expression of Wolf’s gratitude to East Kent for being a place of nurturing as he returned to his craft, a reflection of, as he puts it, “the sense of immediate wonder and fluency that came back to my writing when I got here.” He spent hours researching local history, working to achieve a level of detail that you’d normally associate with researching a literary work, rather than an album.
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.
Wolf wanted to ensure this wasn’t mere window dressing. “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?’ he says. The hooden horse, referenced on ‘Better Or Worse’, is a ritual and performance in which a wooden hobby horse dies and returns with magical powers. “For me, this was 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,” Wolf explains. As well as the grief at death, for Wolf the song also referred to his craft too. “It's grief for who you were, a period of death and coming back,” he says, “I don't know if it's supernatural powers, but I'm definitely stronger than I was before.”
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.”
“Limbo” single artwork:
UK + EU Tour Dates:
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
US + Canada Tour dates:
Wednesday 17 September - Vancouver, Canada- Fox Cabaret
Saturday 20 September - Seattle, WA - Woodlawn Hall
Wednesday 24 September - Portland, OR - Mission Theatre
Saturday 27 September - San Francisco, CA - Regency Lodge
Tuesday 7 October - Los Angeles, CA - Lodge Room
Thursday 9 October - San Diego, CA - The Casbah
Sunday 12 October - Las Vegas, NV - The Griffin
Thursday 16 October - Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge
Sunday 19 October - Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
Thursday 23 October - Kansas City, MO - The Record Bar
Saturday 25 October - Davenport, IA - Raccoon Motel
Tuesday 28 October - St Paul, MN - Amsterdam Hall
Thursday 30 October - Milwaukee, WI - X-Ray Arcade
Monday 3 November - Ferndale (Detroit), MI - The Magic Bag
Thursday 6 November - Toronto, Canada - Longboat Hall
Monday 10 November - Somerville, MA - Centre of The Arts Armory
Thursday 13 November - New York, NY - Adler Hall
Saturday 15 November - Philadelphia, PA - World Cage Live Lounge
Wednesday 19 November - Washington, DC - Pearl Street
1. Reculver
2. Limbo (ft. Zola Jesus)
3. The Last Of England
4. Jupiter
5. On Your Side
6. Oozlum
7. Dies Irae
8. The Curfew Bell
9. Lughnasa (ft. Serafina Steer)
10. Song Of The Scythe
11. Better Or Worse
12. Hymn Of The Haar
13. Foreland
