In celebration of her latest record, I Inside the Old Year Dying, let’s reflect on one of the most consistent careers of the modern alternative rock scene.
As a PJ Harvey fan, you grow accustomed to stumbling over your expectations like a marathon obstacle course. With excitement, you remain forever unsure how long you’ll have to wait before the next hurdle comes your way, but you can only be certain of one thing: whatever happens will be unpredictable.
Born in Dorset, UK, Polly Jean Harvey is an artist’s artist. Her process is an open book of evolution, and we are lucky enough to witness her learning as she goes, never repeating a lesson but always challenging herself and her audience. In doing so, she has constructed a mountain beneath her reputation, where a cult army stands below, saluting her superiority, awaiting orders.
Take her recently released album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, for example. Seven years have passed since her previous, and it felt even longer with the pandemics and wars, the Trumps and Brexits between. Such a prolonged interval would be career suicide for most artists today. A song’s shelf-life is about a week on Tik Tok. Such a lengthy fall from the spotlight could forever bury a lesser musician underneath the bloodthirsty competitors. But Polly Jean Harvey has transcended these bothers because those who know, know. Every offering that Polly Jean blesses us with is a unique entity. Each song presents a personality far removed from what came before. And these wheels of transformation spin beyond simple genre-shifting. They have matured into conceptual foundations that dictate the music rather than the other way around.
Ten albums and 3.5 decades later, now is the perfect juncture to meditate on inarguably one of the most interesting and integrity-driven performers the world has ever heard. It’s a daunting reflection, but we have approached it the best we can, by splitting her projects into four distinct subsections of her creative personality.
Personality One: Rocking It Raw
PJ Harvey tore her own highway down the center of music in 1992 with her debut record Dry. Employing uncooked production and aggressive poetics, Polly hit the scene where it hurt: highlighting significant gender-related disparities, especially the female experience of unfair expectations and objectification. These perspectives made an instant name for PJ as a new icon of woman empowerment, and the accolades were swift to follow. Dry was eventually ranked as Rolling Stone’s 70th-best debut of all time, while NME called it the 151st-greatest album in history.
Sadly, the sudden thrust of attention stabbed into Harvey’s mental health, affecting her sleeping patterns, her eating habits, and even resulting in a relationship breakdown. As this story tends to go, Polly churned her turmoil into craftwork, and her sophomore, Rid of Me, perfectly captured this state of mind. Released a quick year after Dry, it carried that same energetic intent but retracted deeper into herself, exposing the darker sides of obsession, desire, and the awkward intricacies of intimacy. Once again, the critic world dropped to her feet. Slant dubbed it the 25th greatest album of the 90s. Rolling Stone hailed it the 405th best album ever.
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This variation of PJ’s artistry provided the ground for her initial fanbase. Hence, followers will forever treasure the no-nonsense alternative rock coarseness of the early Harvey, a style she has evolved but never fully shed throughout her career. Most notably, on her 2004 album, Uh Huh Her, PJ fell back into these roots, self-producing a dirtier lo-fi product to a mixed response. Regardless, this personality had served its purpose, and PJ had her sights set on higher heights, which she soon directed at the jugular of mainstream radio.
Personality Two: Commercial Radio Darling
To place “commercial” next to “PJ Harvey” is an oxymoron at best, as she’s always festered slightly outside the pop bubble, too peculiar to puncture the surface. That said, she has prodded mainstream several times, and her resume shouts out some massive hits.
1995’s To Bring You My Love is possibly the prime example. The exit of her two band members liberated PJ as a solo act where she could delve into unconventional subjects of her choosing, such as sacrifice and spirituality. She traded her signature raw force for a mysterious bluesy feel that mustered far more power within nocturnal reservations, and it worked! A revitalized PJ crept into the world’s ears and nestled there, selling a million copies, being nominated for two Grammys, and voted the #1 album of the year by Rolling Stone, The New York Times, People, and USA Today.
The moniker PJ Harvey solidified into a potent currency and granted her the resource to dig into weirder lyrical themes and stylistic outputs. However, her taste for mass appeal was now part of her repertoire, and no other album boasted these abilities better than 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Here, Polly flirted with the pop-orientated side of accessible rock music, focusing on melodies with a happier, more comfortable mood shared between her and her listeners. And while she has denied that this was her “New York album”, the big city bustle of urban living is inescapable, especially when her uncharacteristically ordinary cover shows her standing in a blurry Times Square.
Like before, she’d transformed her skin without surrendering her virtue, and this album is up there with her most revered, named one of the top records of the decade by NME (#6), Rolling Stone (#35), and Pitchfork (#124). It also won the 2001 Mercury Prize as her third nomination for the award. She was the first female solo artist to grab that trophy.
Polly’s mastery of dipping in and out of conventional chart music was suspicious, as if she was merely showing off her MTV capabilities but had little interest in it. Still, her knack for snagging the audience with instantly sticky licks was an imperative lesson in her schooling, and these tricks kept her career afloat whenever she wished to leap into the deeper end of artsiness. Which brings us to perhaps the most important yet overlooked section of her discography: when Harvey got so lost in her weirdness that nobody could find her.
Personality Three: Experimental Minimalist
After the unexpected success of 1995’s To Bring You My Love, PJ Harvey retreated inside of herself again to locate some serenity. And within this alienated introspection, she sat in the empty space where her fiery passion had been snuffed out, replaced by a yearning for something quieter. This agitation manifested into Is This Desire?, a downtempo electronic record that leaned on the reliable mechanics of hypnotic trip-hop rhythms with atmospheric soundscapes pasted on top. The audio isolation and loneliness were a worrying result and, from PJ Harvey’s account, an accurate representation of her struggles at that period. But while critics recognized her courage to experiment so far from her signature boundaries, it proved to be out of everyone’s comfort zone and is largely forgotten in the greater scheme of PJ’s discography.
The same could apply to 2007’s White Chalk. Here was a haunted chamber record void of her trademarks, where the rock guitars were replaced by gothic piano keys, minimally ringing out as her higher-ranged vocals were laid thinly over the surface like a delicate veil. Undoubtedly, White Chalk is Harvey’s most disturbingly fragile project, and while the acclaim was high, it was too lonely, too sad, and too cold for the general public. Listeners had difficulty accepting the album, and only the completist superfans still mention it.
Irrespective of tastes, we must admit that all three personalities are required to conglomerate into the greater PJ Harvey universe. The growling frustration of the feminine bite. The clean melodic hooks luring new members into her army. The uncomfortable quirks appealing to oddball ears. With these factors set up, our heroin could speed forward and produce her most roused run of work yet: a calculated and balanced attack on political injustices.
Personality Four: Politicized Conceptual Art
From 2010, PJ’s celebrated inward focus spun outward, and she slowed her productivity to pedantically weave more assertive messages into her craft. 2011’s Let England Shake is the archetype of her newfound direction, using her musical talents and popular podium as a weapon, charging against the atrocities of war and nationalism. Driven by folky poetics, it was her most conceptually realized affair, and it flattened the land in an expert manner that none of her works had achieved before.
After retrieving their jaws from the floor, no end-of-year publication ignored the record, with NME, Mojo, and The Guardian calling it 2010’s very best. It went on to win Harvey her second Mercury Prize too, making her the only artist to snap up the award twice, cementing her as the legendary genius her longtime fans had already stated decades earlier.
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Another five years passed, and 2016 brought us The Hope Six Demolition Project. Still gripping firm onto her political perspectives, this album reined in the monstrous themes of warfare and instead concentrated on pockets of inequality, most blatantly the US administration’s HOPE VI program. Harvey criticized the government’s gentrification plans for low-income public housing, lending her voice to the underprivileged victims of social cleansing, and serving it upon a punchy alternative platter that was as grisly as the subject matter itself.
Unfortunately (although perhaps unsurprisingly), not everyone appreciated PJ’s good intentions. Politicians in Washington, D.C. dismissed the commentary as uneducated, while even music journalists noted that PJ offered little solution to her described problems. The backlash was so stinging that Harvey contemplated retiring from the industry forever.
Thankfully for us, she decided against this drastic action, and on the 7th of July, 2023, we finally heard from our favorite protagonist again. But with the sounds that had already come, where were we now? When someone has done it all, can they do it once more without repeating themselves?
In the case of PJ’s latest, the answer is evidentially, most definitely, yes.
I Inside the Old Year Dying
As always, Harvey’s uncanny knack for reassembling her skillset at strange angles is key to this album, creating a shape slightly different from what we could have ever reasonably expected. But instead of the precise crafting found in her previous two, I Inside the Old Year Dying is a chaotic mix of her artier side. This naturally improvised vibe might even lean closer to her minimal experimentation personality than the others. But within this particular resting space, she seeks the introspection of extrospective. She’s not escaping herself but trying to find herself in a society that has grown increasingly uncomfortable.
Seven years was a long time for PJ to complete this record, but the outcome makes sense. It is comparable to the unhurried procedure of a flower blossoming, which needs to unravel without force; otherwise, it may succumb to damage. But just like the slow reserved pace she’s built around herself here, our sudden introduction to this realm will take effort to settle into, meaning another trickier project which is anything but immediate.
However, for those who are struggling, just remember PJ Harvey is not one thing. She is the sum of distinct components that create a body bigger than who she is. And when taking her career as a whole, I Inside the Old Year Dying is a bulletproof vest slipped over another bulletproof vest. Process these ten albums as a single unit, and they are an infallible energy, no cog more crucial than the other, each so individualistic that none could be rendered redundant.
Hence, PJ continues to carry her fiery torch to even higher plains on her mountain, still reigning as the feminine icon of the alternative indie art rock world. All hail the unsung queen.
