Patrick Wolf, Calvin Arsenia — live event
Patrick Wolf today announces 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. Click HERE to listen. “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.” 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 c
Starts: 2025-10-23T19:00:00Z
Ends: 2025-10-23T21:00:00Z
Where: 1520 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Price: $31.16