Top 10 PJ Harvey Songs

Photo: Dave Mitchell (Plastic Jesus) / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

Polly Jean Harvey is one of Britain’s most prolific singer-songwriters. Her career began in 1988 when she joined a band called Automatic Dlamini, whose frontman, John Parish, is one of her long-term collaborators. She and two other musicians recorded the earliest PJ Harvey releases as a trio before disbanding in 1993, after which she continued as a solo artist. Harvey has released ten studio albums under the PJ Harvey name, from Dry (1992) through I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023), as well as two collaborative studio albums with John Parish.

Harvey has received the Mercury Music Prize twice, the first in 2001 for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and the second in 2011 for Let England Shake. She is the only artist to have received this award more than once. She has also been nominated several times and has received many other nominations at the Brit and Grammy Awards. In June 2026, Harvey released the new single “Voyager,” her first new music since I Inside the Old Year Dying.

Harvey is an artist who has always reinvented her sound. When she releases a record, it is always met with much anticipation. A top 10 song list of hers is never going to be easy to choose from. However, this writer was up to the challenge. So here are the results…

# 10 – On Battleship Hill

The first track on this PJ Harvey songs list is from 2011’s Let England Shake, which saw Harvey at her most politically outspoken. This track is hauntingly beautiful and is lyrically inspired by a real-life battle called the Battle of Chunuk Bair, fought during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. The album was highly acclaimed upon its release and is primarily considered among Harvey’s best work. It received many accolades from much of the music press and charted high in the UK and the US.

# 9 – A Perfect Day Elise

This track was the lead single from Harvey’s fourth album, Is This Desire? The album was released in 1998. It was her highest-charting single on the UK Singles Chart, reaching number twenty-five. Like many other songs on the album, the track is built around a named character, Elise. The album saw Harvey move away from the more guitar-driven sound of her previous albums and into more electronic and atmospheric territory.

# 8 – Rid of Me

Here’s a track that is a fine example of Harvey’s early period. It is the title track of her second album, released in 1993. Like many tracks on it, it sees her go in a much more raw and aggressive direction than on her 1992 debut, Dry. This album was the last to be recorded as a trio, with drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan leaving shortly after its release. The album charted high on the UK chart at number three.

# 7 – Rope Bridge Crossing

This track is from Harvey’s first collaborative record with John Parish. This is a very twangy number featuring Parish’s scratchy guitar, which provides a very fitting backdrop to Harvey’s very soulful vocals. The two had a history of working together before making this as their first full-length album together. As previously stated, she had contributed to some of the music with his band Automatic Dlamini, while he had co-produced and played on her 1995 album To Bring You My Love.

# 6 – The Glorious Land

This next track is the second single taken from Let England Shake. Work on the material that became the album began after the release of Harvey’s seventh album, White Chalk, in 2007. Lyrically, the song deals with nationalism and Britain’s history of war. It was released as a single in April 2011, two months after the album. The song was generally well received upon its release.

# 5 – Good Fortune

This track is the second song and lead single from Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. It is yet another track that received positive critical acclaim when it was released and charted in the UK at number forty-one. As previously stated in the introduction to this article, the album was extremely well received critically upon its release and became her first to win the British Mercury Music Prize in 2001.

# 4 – Easy

Here is a track from the demo album 4-Track Demos, which largely consisted of demos from Rid of Me, as well as some previously unreleased material, including this track. Although it wasn’t a conventional studio album, it was successful, charting at number nineteen on the UK Albums Chart and number ten on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. Many critics praised the recordings, with some even saying they were superior to their Rid of Me counterparts.

# 3 – When Under Ether

This track was a single from 2007’s White Chalk. However, it was not very commercially successful, reaching number 101 on the UK Singles Chart; the physical single peaked at number forty-one on the Official Physical Singles Chart. The song shows a side of Harvey not previously seen, with a haunting, piano-led track that packs a lot into its short two-minute-and-twenty-five-second length. Harvey sounds more vulnerable here, which differs from the usual style that portrays her as more dominant and in control.

# 2 – The Wheel

At the number two spot is the lead single from 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project. This album somewhat took off lyrically from where Let England Shake left off, with this track centered on Harvey’s journey to Kosovo and dealing with disappearances and the aftermath of war. Upon its release, some critics accused the album of being emotionally detached from what the lyrics depicted, with some feeling they were written like a news report.

# 1 – Down by the Water

The lead single from 1995’s To Bring You My Love is at the number one spot. This track marked Harvey’s move away from her punk and alternative influences and toward more electronic instrumentation. Lyrically, the song deals with the rather grim subject of a mother drowning her daughter. It was Harvey’s breakthrough single in the United States, where it reached number two on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart.