Patrick Wolf announces the release of his long-awaited seventh album Crying The Neck due out 25th of April via APPORT/Virgin Music. The album features guest appearances from Zola Jesus, Serafina Steer, drummer Seb Rochford and Wolf 's sister Jo Apps. Alongside news of an extensive UK, European and US tour. Wolf has shared first single "Dies Irae", an anthemic "affirmation of life" set in the days before the passing of his mother.

"Dies Irae" comes from the Latin Requiem Mass and translates to "the day of wrath" or, as Wolf puts it, "the day of separation from the living". He wanted to write a response to that idea, seeing it instead as a "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." He wrote it "to give myself another day I didn't have with my mother during her rapid descent in illness" and hopes that this might also help others who have been through the same process. The string arrangement at the end of the song is based on the Medieval Gregorian chant 'Dies Irae' from the Latin mass. The song, Wolf says, completed the narrative arc of the album, connecting the opening tracks with the "death suite" of pieces in tribute to his mother. " 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 says." 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 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 the 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 th emaking.