‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’: Has PJ Harvey taught us that history doesn’t learn from its mistakes?
If you’re unfortunate enough to remember the torrid year that was 2016, you’ll recall that it was a year characterised by the constant announcements of celebrity deaths, the frightening rise to power of tyrannical business magnate Donald Trump as president-elect of the US, and the collapse of the UK’s international relations due to Brexit and various other ill-informed political decisions. If all of that sounds familiar to you, that’s because just two months into 2025, we appear to be reliving the absolute worst that that year had to offer. We’re so back.
For those who consider themselves fans of PJ Harvey, then one saving grace that year was that the Dorset-born songwriter returned with her first new album in five years, a prospect that delighted many due to how well-received her previous outing, Let England Shake, had been in 2011. Entitled The Hope Six Demolition Project, it presented itself as a spiritual successor to her last album, and given the fact she wrote and recorded the entire record as part of a public art installation at Somerset House, people were eagerly anticipating the direction she would choose to take on the new release.
However, while Let England Shake was billed as a protest album that decried wars and conflicts of the past and Britain’s murky history of committing colonial atrocities, Hope Six reflected more on contemporary issues of poverty in both developed and developing countries, and the social and ethnic displacement of communities in these areas.
The lyrics to the album were largely influenced by her travels alongside photojournalist Seamus Murphy to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, DC, where she provided harrowing accounts of the various forms of suffering that locals endured at the hands of corrupt governments, despotic regimes, and greedy capitalists. While the world hasn’t forgotten about the suffering in these locations, the focus has ultimately shifted towards other places that are being forced to withstand bloody conflicts, genocide and civil war, with Palestine, Ukraine and Yemen being just a few nations affected by such crises.
The album’s title and its opening track, ‘The Community of Hope’ refer to the levelling of one of the US capital’s major social housing projects in order to develop the land and provide a sense of aspiration and economic revitalisation within the community. However, through Harvey’s lens, it portrays a massive oversight from local governments through them removing the most basic necessities from an impoverished community, such as healthcare institutions and affordable housing, and lines about building restaurants and a Walmart on this very land represent gentrification and neglect of the people that make up the local community.
Moving further afield, Harvey reflects on her experiences in the war-torn areas of Kosovo and Afghanistan, both of which have suffered from unrest since before the turn of the century. Citing statistics of children that have gone missing at the hands of displacement and systematic killing from governments and militia on ‘The Wheel’ and vividly describing the hunger and starvation of children affected by conflict on ‘Dollar, Dollar’, Harvey doesn’t sugar-coat any of the harrowing images she was confronted with during her visits to these areas of devastation.
While it’s never easy to be confronted with such visceral images of suffering, you’d think that the response to Harvey’s ninth album would have been one of wishing to reflect on the atrocities taking place in the world and might have provoked direct action to improve these horrific situations. However, several listeners were critical of Harvey’s portrayal of life in these stricken areas, labelling the record as a sickeningly inaccurate image tantamount to poverty porn and seeking to make a profit and gain attention through using depictions of others’ hardships.
It’s also not easy to discuss such subject matters and manage to do so in a way that accurately portrays the severity of a situation while remaining sensitive to the adversity that others are experiencing. If you’re willing to accept that Harvey’s intentions were to shed light on the difficulties faced by displaced communities and not to take advantage of the plight of others for her own artistic and commercial gains, then is it also possible to look past the occasionally clumsy ways in which she discusses said matters in her work?
The most unfortunate thing about the messaging behind Hope Six is that everything that Harvey wished to hold people accountable for is still ongoing, both in the areas that she specifically focused on and beyond. If the album is indicative of anything, it’s that years on from its release, history continues to be unable to learn from its errors, and that its relevance will continue to stay strong for as long as those in power continue to fail to repair the damage they have caused or atone for their campaigns of violence.
