Polly Jean Harvey (Bridport, United Kingdom, 54 years old) is clear about it. If his career hadn't started in 1991, he wouldn't have had anything to do in the music world. "In the '90s there was an opening for the kind of music I was making. Especially for women. The support I received was immediate," he said on Saturday in a hotel in Barcelona, a few hours before his concert at Primavera Sound, which he will repeat this Friday in Madrid as part of the Noches del Botánico. "If I debuted today, it would be a lot harder. I don't think I would get anywhere, because there's no room anymore," says the singer, sitting with the demeanor of a classical dancer in front of a cup of coffee. "Everything is going too fast. Before, an album had a life of one year. Now it is not even a week later. I am as guilty as anyone. I used to buy a vinyl, sit down and listen to it in its entirety. Now I give a song a minute and, if I don't like it, I pass it on. I've become a consumer, and it's a word I hate."
Before the interview, she has set two conditions in the form of kind suggestions: not to talk too much about the past or the place of women in the industry. Only that she has not taken long to skip them herself, a sign that the singer has a transgressive mind. Especially, when it comes to going against herself and against what was expected of her. She has made it clear since she debuted, allergic to labels at a time when she hung the name of riot grrrl, as the feminists of the alternative scene of the nineties were called, on every unsubmissive woman. While some were doing radio grunge, Harvey sang songs about bleeding clitorises, inspired by Ingmar Bergman movies. Their albums, raw and bellicose, were tinged with violence and desire, danger and ecstasy, while others limited themselves to making love with their clothes on.
"Since I was a child I have heard voices and I have had visions, perhaps of ghosts. When I grew up, I realized that they were presences and ideas that went through my body and I turned them into songs"
The cliché goes that she has done nothing but reinvent herself. He has signed 10 albums with a single rule: not to repeat himself, to continue looking for ways to transfigure his sound, to avoid the easy resource of autobiographical explanation, to which he has an aversion. Her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, which she will present in Madrid alternating her new songs with a handful of old hits, is an introspective and timeless work that is loosely inspired by her childhood and adolescence in Dorset, through a nine-year-old girl who acts as a narrator (but, she insists, nothing to do with her life). "When you've been making music for 30 years, it's hard to remember who you were at the beginning, what you wrote at 17 or 18. What I remember is the feeling I had when I finished my first song: the absolute happiness of finding a mode of expression that would fit my soul entirely. That has never left me, it has been my common thread in all my albums." In the Barcelona night, under a magical rain, he played two of his first songs, Dress and 50ft Queenie, with the composure that the passage of time has given him.
PJ Harvey's entire career has been an attempt to avoid becoming a product. It almost happened twice. The first, after their first album, Dry. "My record company, which was going to be absorbed by Universal, suggested names of musicians and producers. They wanted it to adopt more commercial features. I had to fight to work with Steve Albini on Rid of Me," he says about the legendary producer, who died in May, who gave a decisive turn to his sound, and to his life. "With that album I realized that as an artist I was going to continue to change and that I was not going to let anything or anyone show me the way, except my instinct." Did they also mess with his way of presenting himself to the world? "Yes, they gave me names of photographers and designers. I was very polite, I didn't get angry, but I said no. Maybe it wasn't what they expected, but they realized that they could also make a profit out of it. Even if he didn't sell a lot of records, he had respect and loyalty, and those are things that are also worth a lot."

The second time was after Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the biggest of his hits, which he released in 2000. It would be his most luminous album. "My challenge was to write a beautiful pop album where all the songs were single. I was in a very happy time, I spent part of my time in New York and I had a great time. Those songs reflect that joy and encouragement well. But, when I finished it, I moved on to something else. I'm proud of that album, but there are phases that reflect my desires as a person and artist better than others." In 2004 she released Uh Huh Her, one of her most misunderstood albums, which definitively took her away from the flat path of the commercial.
Folklore has always interested Harvey, but it takes on an unprecedented role in Orlam, the verse novel he published in 2022, and on this new album. The two, who share the same narrative, are partially written in the dialect of Dorset, his region on England's south coast, with resonances of medieval English, which he learned over months to compose his verses. "I will never be able to leave that place, its kilometers of forest and its Jurassic coast. We are close to Stonehenge and the Cerne Abbas Giant. I see the magic that this ancestral landscape contains, centuries of history that I can feel under my feet and floating in the air."
"After my last record, I felt lost. I felt that I was not at my best, that I was not doing my best, and I wondered if I should take another path."
It would seem that Harvey feels a supernatural connection with that landscape. You can even see a specter walking through his songs. "I may sound like a crackpot, but since I was little I have heard voices and had visions, perhaps of ghosts. When I grew up, I realized that they were presences and ideas that went through my body and that I turned into music and words." That is, in songs. The other side of the coin are the biblical images, leitmotif since her first songs, in which she embodied contemporary disciples of Delilah or Mary Magdalene. "For many of us, religion has been a veil that covered us growing up. I always wanted to know what was underneath that mantle," he says.
During the pandemic, he considered quitting music. He returned to it after a long period of reflection. "After my last album and tour, I felt lost. I felt like I wasn't at my best, that I wasn't doing my best, and I wondered if I should take another path," Harvey explains. "When you enter 50, you reflect on the past and on the years ahead of you, which are getting fewer and fewer. I asked myself if I wanted to continue doing this with the three decades I had left." He promised himself that, if he returned to music, it would not be by inertia. "I had to do it out of passion. I had to wait two years, but he came back. I realized that this is what I love." His plan B was to pursue visual art, which is what he studied for. But my strength is as a singer and songwriter. Now I know it's my strong point." Hadn't you noticed it until now? "Yes, it's recent," he admits without false modesty. "It was never a certainty. I used to wonder if I was doing as well as I could, if I could be doing something better with my life. Since this new album, I feel safer. That's why I've decided to continue."