PJ Harvey
Sydney Opera House Forecourt
13 March 2025
Sydney, Australia
Some artists perform. PJ Harvey transmutes. Like a figure walking between worlds, she never lingers too long in one place, never allows herself to fossilize into nostalgia. Instead, she reinvents - without ever severing the thread that binds her to her own mythos.
On the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, beneath a sky that hovered between dusk and ink, she did not simply return after eight years - she arrived, once again, as something new, yet deeply familiar. Clad in spectral white, she was part oracle, part wandering poet, part phantom slipping between centuries. The air itself seemed altered, thick with the kind of reverence reserved for artists who don’t just hold a career but a legacy.
This was no ordinary setlist. It was a weaving of past and present, tethered largely to I Inside the Old Year Dying- - an album that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a whispered transmission from some forgotten place. The album’s lexicon, built from fragments of archaic English and Dorset folklore, carried into the live experience like an old book brought to life.
She opened with Prayer at the Gate, her voice delicate yet commanding, as if summoning unseen forces. The stage - lit like a woodland clearing caught between twilight and dream - felt more like a passageway than a platform. Each note flickered like candlelight in the dark, and by Seem an I, she was no longer just singing - she was moving like something untethered, a shadow stepping out of time.
There was an unmistakable alchemy at play, a theatrical mysticism that recalled Kate Bush in her heyday. The way Bush once moved across the stage - part wraith, part storyteller, her voice floating between ethereal whispers and primal howls - found its echo in Harvey’s presence. But whereas Bush’s art was steeped in surreal romanticism, Harvey’s was raw, earthen, filled with the murmur of ghosts and the pull of ancient soil. If Bush conjured spirits from the attic, Harvey unearthed them from the roots.
The spectral atmosphere deepened with The Nether-Edge, its haunting drones stretching into the night air like tendrils of mist, while Lwonesome Tonight had the strange intimacy of a fireside confession. Her band - longtime alchemists of sound John Parish, James Johnston, Jean-Marc Butty, and Giovanni Ferrario - played not as backing musicians but as echoes, reverberations of whatever spectral landscape Harvey was painting.
Yet Harvey has never been a prisoner of her present. Some artists carve out eras like museum exhibits - pristine, preserved, untouched. But her past work does not sit still; it moves with her, reshaping itself. When 50ft Queenie erupted mid-set, it wasn’t nostalgia - it was time folding in on itself, the raw bite of 1993 crashing against the eerie hush of her latest work. The same could be said for The Glorious Land, its war-drummed refrain bleeding into The Words That Maketh Murder, as if history were circling itself, whispering the same warning.
And then there was Down by the Water - the song that first cast her as a gothic siren in the mid-'90s. Here, it felt even more haunted, istretching out like a cautionary lullaby sung at the edge of the abyss.
It was not the raucous, call-and-response climax some might expect from a closing number. But that has never been Harvey’s way. She does not bow to expectations - she dismantles them, rearranges them, leaves behind only what she chooses.
She spoke little, as she always does and then she was gone. No overexplanation. No indulgence.
PJ Harvey does not need to overstay. The weight of her presence lingers long after she exits, like ink drying on a final page. To witness her live is not simply to watch a concert - it is to glimpse an artist in a constant state of becoming, one who understands that the only way to remain true is to keep moving, always.
