Crying the Neck (album)

Crying the Neck is the seventh studio album by English singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf, scheduled to be released on June 13, 2025, on Apport/Virgin Music. It marks Wolf's first full-length album release of new music since Lupercalia in 2011.

The phrase "Crying the Neck" refers to a harvest festival tradition 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. The album is heavily inspired by the local folklore of Wolf's home in East Kent and is the first in a series of four planned albums following the pagan Wheel of the Year.

Wolf is planning a spring European tour entitled Stations of the Sun, which is also the name of a book by renowned British historian Ronald Hutton that focuses on the British ritual year.

The album will feature guest appearances from Zola Jesus, Serafina Steer, and Polar Bear's Seb Rochford.

Wolf released the first single from the album, "Dies Irae", on February 4, 2025. 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. “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 second single, "Limbo", a duet with Zola Jesus, was released on March 18, 2025. 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. 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. "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.