PJ Harvey has shared the first single off her ninth full-length studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, which is due out April 15th via Island Records. The new song is titled "The Wheel" and you can stream the full song as well as a radio edit of it via the artist's Spotify below at the end of this article.

The new track premiered Friday afternoon on Steve Lamacq's show on BBC Radio 6, Pitchfork reports. "The Wheel" can also be heard alongside clips of another song off the forthcoming album, "The Community of Hope," in the Seamus Murphy-directed trailer for the album. Watch the preview below.

"The Wheel" follows in the same vein as much of the singer-songwriter's decades-spanning career built out of defiant guitar growls and moody vocals. With saxophones raging through the entire track, the singer-songwriter invokes the spirits of rockers David Bowie and Lou Reed who similarly embraced the badass potential of the woodwind.

The Hope Six Demolition Project is the result of Harvey's Recording In Progress exhibition held in London last year which featured the artist hard at work in a specially-constructed studio that was fully visible to the public.

In contrast to 2011's Let England Shake, in which Harvey focused on issues of war and what it means to be English, The Hope Six Demolition Project documents the artist's recent travels to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC. The new album's songs--as well as her poetry book, The Hollow of the Hand--were written during a four-year period of traveling alongside filmmaker and collaborator, Seamus Murphy.

In a statement about the impact of her experiences abroad on the album's creation, Harvey said: "When I'm writing a song I visualise the entire scene. I can see the colours, I can tell the time of day, I can sense the mood, I can see the light changing, the shadows moving, everything in that picture. Gathering information from secondary sources felt too far removed for what I was trying to write about. I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with," The Guardian reports.
 

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