Is This Desire? by PJ Harvey

Is This Desire?, PJ Harvey's fourth studio album, came out on Island on 28 September 1998, and it's the least comfortable listen she'd served up yet, which is saying something. Flood, the producer she kept coming back to, helps her build it out of shadows and static: fractured beats, murky keyboards, guitars that flare up and then vanish.

Harvey mostly holds back the roar here, pulling you in close instead of blowing you over. "A Perfect Day Elise" is the one that bites hardest, all nervous tension and sudden lurch, and the title track aches in a hushed, unsettled way. It's a record that doesn't hand you much, and that's the point. Island gave it a fresh vinyl pressing in early 2021, with a companion set of the album's demos issued alongside it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.