Patrick Wolf Shares 'Hymn Of The Haar'

04-19-2025

(ET) Patrick Wolf Shares 'Hymn Of The Haar'

Patrick Wolf shares a new track today, 'Hymn Of The Haar' from his much-anticipated new album Crying The Neck

Patrick Wolf shares a new track today, 'Hymn Of The Haar' from his much-anticipated new album Crying The Neck out June 13 via Apport/Virgin Music.

Wolf discusses the song: "I wrote Hymn of the Haar over three years of writing walks and researching the history and psychogeography of the White Cliffs of Dover near where I live and work in East Kent.

Patrick Wolf shares a new track today, 'Hymn Of The Haar' from his much-anticipated new album Crying The Neck out June 13 via Apport/Virgin Music.

"Studying from the romantic mythologizing aspect of Alice Duer Miller's famous work and the cliffs famous wartime anthem to observing Dover relentlessly exploited as the centre of "crisis" after "crisis" within the British media. I felt the need to write this, my own private relationship with of this beautiful and bewildering stretch of land, bringing me so much solace over the years, its antidote.

"Ultimately it became a song that accepts, as I have at my age, that we can only learn how to live alongside our miseries 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. It was with this song I began to make out a relationship between Crying the Neck and my second album Wind in the Wires, where at 21 I was fighting to be free by being free of my sorrows but 20 years later I finally achieved that freedom in the acceptance of living alongside them.

The final line is taken from a 10th Century poem written in Old English called "The Wanderer": "Oft him anhaga are gebideð" translating to "Often the solitary one finds mercy"