Time Capsule: PJ Harvey, Is This Desire?

In the grand scheme of PJ Harvey’s illustrious career, her fourth solo record, Is This Desire?, often gets overlooked. It’s understandable, bookended as it is by her breakout hit (1995’s To Bring You My Love) and her greatest commercial success (2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea). It’s understandable, but criminal.

Of course, the fact that an album like Is This Desire? could ever possibly fall between the cracks is itself a testament to the ridiculously high quality of each and every installment in the revered British indie musician’s discography—but Desire? is, frankly, a masterpiece, and possibly even some of her best work (which is, again, really saying something). At least, Harvey herself considers it to be. Desire? is “probably my favorite record that I’ve made,” she told Filter Magazine in 2004, “because it had a lot of guts.” She doubled down on the statement in a piece for The Telegraph, saying “I do think Is This Desire? is the best record I ever made—maybe ever will make—and I feel that that was probably the highlight of my career.” It was an incredibly difficult album for her to make, written during an incredibly difficult period in her life, and for that reason, she’s said she still finds it “very difficult to listen to.” Desire? bleeds with honesty, with yearning and discomfort and uncertainty—it is painfully, uncomfortably human. Harvey says she “gave 100% of [herself] to that record,” and you can hear the truth of that statement in every whisper, every riff, every shriek, every breath.

The fact that PJ Harvey put her entire soul into Is This Desire? feels so evident that, sometimes, listening to the album makes me feel like I should be undergoing a life-altering, personal revelation in real time, at that very moment, if only so the moment in question would feel worthy of Harvey’s soundtrack. Is This Desire? pulls you in gut-first, and it doesn’t relinquish its hold on you until it’s good and ready. The gothic soundscape and the stories that make it up (many of which were, in fact, inspired by tales from the reigning queen of Southern Gothic herself, Flannery O’Connor) are an entire world in and of themselves, but less a fictional land of Harvey’s creation than an altered, perpetually barren, wintry rendition of our own. The world feels changed when you’re experiencing it with Desire? as the score—it’s as if you’re seeing everything anew, through Harvey-colored lenses. Everything feels like an epiphany, haunted by some meaning that lingers just out of your reach. (I know, I know, the way I talk about Is This Desire? sounds a little like the way hipsters obsessed with IPAs talk about that one time they did shrooms in college. In my defense, it is an apt description!).

Is This Desire? is a masterclass in emotional cohesion—Harvey never sacrifices stylistic variance for the tonal throughline, or vice versa. Despite traveling across myriad sonic landscapes, the album never produces that sense of whiplash, of breakage, that can often be found between sharply contrasting songs. The record ricochets from banshee wails and aggressive waves of sound (for instance, the vocal distortions of “No Girl So Sweet” or the head-banging fury of the “The Sky Lit Up”) to breathy murmurs and drumlines so light you could almost convince yourself they weren’t even there to begin with (the almost unbearably faint kitwork on “Electric Light” or the ASMR whispers of “The Wind”), pinballing between sonic extremes with each and every new track—and yet it all flows seamlessly, like a cool river of sweat winding its way down your neck. Harvey makes hushed trip-hop ballads feel as if they bleed straight into shrieking post-punk anthems, all of which work together to evoke that singular, ineffable ache that serves as the record’s beating heart. Each song feels as if it’s just another organ, as different as its form and function may be from the one that came before, all working in tandem to make up an organic-seeming whole that somehow breathes and moves in subdued unison, asking over and over again: Is this desire?

The answer? Yes, and also no. And also, really, the point seems to be less in the answer than in the question itself, in the asking of it. Is This Desire? isn’t trying to give a solution to its titular question, but to enumerate its countless permutations, and the desperation interwoven within all of them. Song after song, Harvey pulls apart yet another thread, unraveling the tapestry of desire and the genuinely countless strands that make up that cruel triangulation of love and loss and lust and everything else besides. After all, if we don’t know what desire is, let alone where it begins or ends, there is nothing that we can be certain isn’t desire. Everything is desire and nothing is, it’s both too much and never enough, and there’s nothing any of us can do about any of it.

Is This Desire? is a portrait gallery of longing, its songs populated by characters (some taken from or inspired by classic works of literature, others rooted in Harvey’s own imagination) with little in common aside from sharing that same desperate ache. Our first stop is the brooding, velveteen “Angelene,” centering the titular “prettiest mess you’ve ever seen”: a small-town prostitute with a “pretty mouth and green my eyes,” a description taken straight from J.D. Salinger’s short story by the same name. Angelene is at once cynical enough to sneer “love for money is my sin” yet clinging helplessly enough to naive hopes to spend much of her time dreaming of a savior, some blurred faceless man coming from “two thousand miles away” to guide her to something brighter. Harvey suspends her creation in sparse, alt-country arrangements that feel like twilight settling over empty streets or footsteps echoing on the cold floor of a church, with bluesy piano and funeral parlor organ casting long shadows beneath her smooth drawl. She sings every word as if she’s cradling it, empathy for her protagonist sitting heavy on her tongue. For Angelene, desire serves as both a fatal poison and its lone antidote—that which traps us, that which sets us free.

“The Sky Lit Up” bursts in like an electrical storm after the haunting quietude of “Angelene,” yet that same melancholic undertone is established almost immediately, making it feel not like a stark departure from the previous track but an extension of it, a variation on the same theme. But it builds and builds into something aggressive, industrial; all groaning guitars and processed clattering drums, you’re quickly swept up into the song’s thudding propulsion. “Sky” is a song that demands to be listened to at a near-painful volume while furiously pushing past city streets, the pace of your stride alone enough to clear a path around you.

There are few things more satisfying than walking in the city at night alongside PJ Harvey’s declaration of doing the exact same, voice almost shaking with controlled intensity—a control that’s relinquished soon enough, the song’s title eventually howling like a primal scream. Both the instrumentation and the temporality of the song are intricately layered, with the lyrics interweaving present-tense city walks with past memories and future hopes, creating a dreamlike state where time becomes fluid. Harvey’s lyrics paint evocative snapshots: remembering light, shooting stars, trees crossing the moon, while the protagonist dances with an unnamed “him” through a city and town with reckless abandon. The narrative flows from personal memory (“my hair longer than it’s ever been”) into cosmic imagery (“I saw the stars in the heaven above”) with ease, feeling at once transcendent and overcome with raw, earthbound urgency.

Just before the vibrating echo of Harvey’s final cry of “The sky lit up!” fades entirely, “The Wind” arrives like a noir fever dream with a light caress of a vibraphone and then dissolves into whispered intimacy: “Catherine likes high places,” Harvey breathes directly into your ear (think modern day ASMR YouTubers, but enigmatic and conspiratorial rather than nails-on-a-chalkboard uncomfortable). I mean, how many songs feature a beloved singer whispering straight into the mic about a woman who likes hills because she can make whale noises there (followed, of course, by a reverberating electronica approximation of a whale noise in the background)? Not enough, I’ll tell you that.

But “The Wind” is more than delightful oddity; it’s legitimately arresting. Inspired by the chapel of St. Catherine of Alexandria (the patron saint of unmarried women, who is alluded to again on the later track “Catherine”) near Harvey’s birthplace in Dorset, the song weaves a hypnotic spell through its trip-hop influenced production, with brittle drum samples and deep bass creating a nocturnal landscape for Harvey’s doubled vocals—the first the aforementioned whisper, the latter a ghostly falsetto. The isolation of the chapel feels almost tangible, as does Catherine’s plagued psyche, preoccupied as it is with thoughts of her imminent execution (“torture on the wheel”) interspersed with hints of children’s voices and the indecipherable whispers on the wind. “She once was a lady,” Harvey sings. “But now she sits and moans.” The speaker of the song begs her mother to “give / A husband to our Catherine,” so she has “someone to listen with”—but that prescribed companionship is less Catherine’s desire than that of her onlooker, the suggestion almost a violation of Catherine’s sacred chosen solitude.

Yet that hypothetical violation is barely a hint of what’s to come—the following triptych of songs comprise a devastating trilogy of obsession, violence, and unrequited longing. “My Beautiful Leah” staggers in like a zombie with its groaning, industrial soundscape, stilted splatters of synth and drum, and relentless forward momentum. The song is, perhaps, best summarized by way of its stark, haunting conclusion: “It never leaves my mind / The last words she said,” Harvey intones, before flattening into a monotone for the uncompromisingly bleak final couplet of “If I don’t find it this time / Then I’m better off dead.” The track immediately cuts off with the voicing of the final word, letting it ring out in the chasm the silence creates in its wake. It’s so bleak, in fact, that it served as something of a final straw for Harvey herself, who told The Observer in 1999 that she “listened back to that song and I thought, ‘No! This is enough! No more of this! I don’t want to be like this.’ … I knew I needed to get help. I wanted to get help.” And she did—she started therapy and moved in with collaborators John Parish and Maria Mochnacz, beginning that arduous trek towards healing.