Mick Harvey Announces New Solo Album 'Five Ways To Say Goodbye'

Australian rocker Mick Harvey will release his first solo album in ten years, Five Ways To Say Goodbye, later this year via Mute.

The album follows years of soundtrack albums, translating Serge Gainsbourg’s numerous works to English and collaborative releases with Christopher Richard Barker in 2018 and Amanda Acevedo in 2023. Five Ways To Say Goodbye is his first proper solo album since 2013’s Four (Acts Of Love).

Known for his production work and musicianship with PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Mick Harvey has had a consistent presence across the Australian alternative rock and post-punk scenes for nearly five decades.

Five Ways To Say Goodbye will land on Friday, 10 May, and will feature 12 tracks, comprising original music and reinterpreted versions of songs written by artists including Ed Kuepper (co-founder of The Saints), Fatal Shore (Phil Shoenfelt and Bruno Adams), David McComb (The Triffids / Blackeyed Susans), Lo Carmen and Lee Hazelwood. The album notably features the song A Suitcase In Berlin, which Harvey originally released last year.

In a press release, Harvey said about the reinterpretations on his upcoming album, “I don't think cover is appropriate terminology. It’s not a copy.

“To my mind, it’s more in the traditional of how songs used to be, where they would mutate, and you'd end up with lots of different versions. One is really just passing the music on and sharing the songs further.”

Harvey explained about the new creative collection, “[The album] is kind of about farewells or saying goodbye. There’s a lot around that subject, so it's got a kind of melancholy and sentimentality around it.”

You can watch the music video for the first single, When We Were Beautiful & Young, below. Pre-order Five Ways To Say Goodbye here.

Last year, Harvey teamed up with Adalita and Models’ Andrew Duffield to cover Michael Hutchence’s Rooms For The Memory in honour of the song’s composer, Ollie Olsen, who in 2020 was diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy (a form of Parkinson’s). 

Jane Gazzo, the executive producer of the 2023 version of Rooms For The Memory, commented in a press release, “Remarkably all the musicians, including Adalita and Mick Harvey – two of the country’s finest artists – were completely up to donating their time and had belief in the project. I think this is a stunning rework, and I really hope the music industry and public get behind it and give it the new lease of life we know it deserves.”