Ahead of this week's final installment of PJ Harvey's (PJHarveyUK) reissue/demo series, we ranked the singular artist's discography:
The artist known as Polly Jean Harvey confounds; it’s simply her nature. This year marks the 30th anniversary of her debut album, and therefore her entry into the public consciousness, and we’ve yet to pin her down. She sounds like nobody else, not even herself, from release to release. She’s accomplished the feat of building a carefully crafted aesthetic, sound and even vocal style for each piece of work she puts out, setting stringent barriers between one album era and the next.
Even more impressive is the general consensus that PJ Harvey has never released a truly bad album. Many would argue that every release is a necessary piece of understanding the ever-shifting audiovisual web she weaves. For the past few years, Harvey has been revisiting the worlds she created with each of her albums for a series of reissues, with each project accompanied by a sibling album of demos. These full-length demo records follow the format first set by, featuring rough versions of the songs from the studio album to which it was attached.