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.