Crying the Neck is the seventh studio album by English singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf, released on 13 June 2025 by Apport and distributed by Virgin Music.[1][2] It marks Wolf's first full-length release of new music since Lupercalia in 2011. The album is the first in a series of four planned albums following the pagan Wheel of the Year.[3]
To support the album, Wolf embarked on a European tour entitled Stations of the Sun,[4] which is also the name of a book by renowned British historian Ronald Hutton that focuses on the British ritual year.
Wolf released the first single from the album, "Dies Irae", on 4 February 2025.[3] The title is inspired by the Latin Requiem Mass, and the song imagines Wolf and his family celebrating one last day with his mother before her death. Wolf called it "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. 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 told Luke Turner of The Quietus.[3]
The second single, "Limbo", a duet with Zola Jesus, was released on 18 March 2025.[5] It tells the story of a purgatorial road trip in which a couple is fighting, and takes some of its inspiration from the painting The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt.[5] Wolf released a third track, "Hymn of the Haar", on April 15, inspired by the landscapes, plants and animals of the Kent coast and the White Cliffs of Dover.[6] "Ultimately it became a song that accepts, as I have at my age, that we can only learn how to live alongside our sorrows in order to be temporarily free of them, arriving and departing, temporarily obscuring our path and vision in the hymn of the passing mist of cloud, the sea fret, the haar," Wolf said. The song concludes with the opening line of the early Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer.[6]
Background and recording
Patrick Wolf released the extended playThe Night Safari in 2023, ending a decade-long hiatus from music following the 2012 release of the double album Sundark and Riverlight, which he regarded as a swan song to his career.[7] Wolf struggled with a number of issues in the following years, including addiction, bankruptcy, recuperating from a hit and run, and the death of his mother from cancer.[7] During this time he moved from London to the east of Kent, finding solace in a quiet and peaceful life, and became inspired by the landscape and folklore of his new surroundings.[8] In writing for the record, Wolf drew parallels between the death of his mother, strained interpersonal relationships, and the decay of rural English identity.[8] The title of the album originates from a harvest festival tradition called "crying the neck", once common in the counties of Devon and Cornwall in the United Kingdom, in which a farm worker holds aloft the final handful of cut corn and a series of calls are chanted.
As with much of his previous work, Crying the Neck was largely written and arranged by Wolf himself, incorporating instruments such as the viola, Appalachian dulcimer, ukulele, kantale and Atari computer.[3] The album features guest appearances from Zola Jesus, Serafina Steer, and Polar Bear's Seb Rochford.[9] Wolf's sister Jo Apps also contributed last-minute backing vocals towards "Dies Irae", which the siblings found cathartic as a way to "share a last dance in the kitchen with our ma together."[3] Additional production, engineering and mixing was handled by Brendan Cox at Tileyard Studios in London, with whom Wolf had previously worked on The Night Safari.
Crying The Neck received positive reviews from music critics. On the review aggregator Metacritic, Crying the Neck received a weighted average score of 81 out of 100 based on 7 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Writing for The Quietus, which named it "Album of the Week", Robert Davidson described the record as "a cathartic, erudite, and complex work that serves as the beginning of a new chapter for Wolf." John Murphy of musicOMH wrote that it was "a record of catharsis, in effect... steeped in the lore and mystique of his home in East Kent." Attila Peter of The Line of Best Fit stated that the album retained many elements of Wolf's previous work, such as "genre eclecticism, collaborations, literary lyrics, and vulnerability paired with a theatrical air", but opined that the "overblown" production tended to overwhelm "subtle, delicate" moments.[13]
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