This Mess We’re In: PJ Harvey/Thom Yorke

PJ Harvey’s ‘This Mess We’re In’, from her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, is a fragile jewel—an intimate duet with Thom Yorke that feels like a sigh of a confession in the ruins of modern love.

Harvey’s voice enters first, hushed yet resolute, carrying the song’s delicate architecture with wounded grace. There’s a tremor in her delivery, as though each syllable might collapse under the weight of its own vulnerability.

The refrain, ‘The city sunset over me,’ makes the song about a planetary and personal disaster at the same time.


Yorke’s presence is spectral, his falsetto weaving around Harvey’s lines like smoke. The interplay of the voices a tender, tired negotiation, two voices circling each other to sleep.

Musically, the track is spare—piano chords and subtle textures that echo the emptiness of the city streets it evokes. And within that sparseness blooms intimacy. The song becomes a moment of raw humanity captured in sound. ‘This Mess We’re In’ is a brittle dialogue, a signature tune of the plight all of us face sometime or another.