You can almost hear Harvey’s work boots squish through the moorland muck in the burbling bass tones that tie most of the songs together, simmering under the surface of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds,” twitching through the intro to “Yuri-G,” building tension in the hushed interlude a minute before “Dry” launches its final attack. She also imported these sounds from an agricultural region thousands of miles from Dorset: the Mississippi Delta. Rid of Me was neither the first nor the last PJ Harvey album that, unlike the punk-derived rock so many of her white contemporaries were making at the time, felt grounded in the blues. 1995’s To Bring You My Love, her masterpiece of dark sensuality, drew even more heavily on the structures and tropes of American roots music. But Rid of Me is still the PJ Harvey release that succeeds most spectacularly in evoking the unvarnished emotional intensity of the blues without ever resorting to mimicry.

Some of that immediacy came thanks to producer Steve Albini, whom Harvey hired in spite of acquaintances’ warnings about “what he’s like with women.” Just before he’d help Nirvana restore the raw edges of their pre-Nevermind recordings on In Utero, Albini performed his minimalist magic on Rid of Me, capturing the depth of the band’s live sound by working quickly and recording the full trio at once. “I can get precious about things, and Albini doesn’t allow you to do that,” Harvey said in one interview. The band spent barely two weeks in the studio, mixing included. Though Albini’s warts-and-all method was a product of the punk tradition he treasured, its messiness proved equally well-suited to a blues aesthetic; an audible cough at the beginning of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds” suggests the homespun intimacy of a hastily recorded 78.

Like the music of Pixies, whose 1988 debut Surfer Rosa Albini had produced, the album thrives on sudden shifts in volume and tone. It opens, on “Rid of Me,” at a whisper. Even the drums sound like echoes from a mile away until, midway through the track, every instrument shifts to a scream and Harvey spits out the chorus—“Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”—her voice coated in venom. The abruptness only magnifies the impact. Each song is a different scary pop-up book: Turn any page and a three-dimensional monster could leap out at you.

At other moments on the album, it’s the sparseness of the instrumentals that throws Harvey’s words into relief: “I might as well be dead,” she bellows, amid the droning guitars and clanking percussion of “Legs.” Then, suddenly, the song is ending, and only the ghost of a strum accompanies the chilling final line, “But I could kill you instead.” On “Dry,” written for the album of the same name but saved for Rid of Me, a similar quiet sets in the first time Harvey utters the defining kiss-off of her early career: “You leave me dry.”

To overstate the power of Albini’s recordings, however, is to undervalue the versatility of Harvey’s songwriting. “Man-Size,” which appears in two very different versions, makes for a cathartic shout-along rocker; as a poem recited over a haunted string sextet, it’s unsettling enough to soundtrack a Hitchcock thriller. Amid the campy, sci-fi/rockabilly sprint of fan-favorite single “50 Ft. Queenie” and brutal verbal assaults like “Snake,” “Missed” is the most conventionally pretty song. In a chorus that escalates as she repeats “No, I missed him,” Harvey could be baring her lonely soul. But the verses channel that quotidian heartbreak through a more vivid and specific story that some have interpreted as alluding to the gruesome tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots.

You wouldn’t have known it from the way Rid of Me was psychoanalyzed, but most—possibly all—of its songs contain or are written in the voices of characters who are not literally Polly Jean Harvey and the men who crossed her path. She has called “Highway 61 Revisited”—the raucous Bob Dylan rag that she covers here as a frantic invocation of Patti Smith—a formative influence on her songwriting. Beginning with a dust-up between God and Abraham, before flashing forward to the 20th century the blues-rock classic really does fit seamlessly with her original compositions. Her stories, from the possibly abusive relationship detailed in “Hook” to the Miltonian encounter between Eve and the serpent that comprises “Snake,” often take the form of dialogues, with Harvey giving voice to women, men, and various other animals.

Many of these narratives are grounded in history, religion, or the arts: “Me-Jane” is, as the title suggests, a lament from Tarzan’s long-suffering civilized partner. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman inspired “50 Ft Queenie.” Mythology was an obsession of her mother’s, and Harvey’s language on Rid of Me subtly reflects that. “Yuri-G” is a sort of pagan love spell addressed to the moon goddess Luna. “I’ll make you lick my injuries/I’m going to twist your head off, see,” from the title track, is supposed to be one of the album’s most fearsome images. Yet that “see” changes everything, transforming a lurid threat into the goofy taunt of a movie gangster or a fairy-tale giant. Even as she was singing from her soul, Harvey was acting.

Of course, the part every person plays from childhood to death—whether we embrace it, subvert it, change it, or some combination of the three—is our gender role, which may not look quite the same in the city as it does on the farm. Women who inhabit non-traditional gender roles, as Harvey certainly has throughout her career, are often presumed to be speaking as feminists. But, as gratifying as it would have been to hear her proclaim allyship with fans who believed in the equality of the sexes, you can see why she tried to prevent Rid of Me from being viewed through that lens.

As a child, Harvey expressed her desire to be a boy by sitting backwards on toilet seats in an imitation of the way her older brother peed and demanding to be called Paul. When she drawls “Got my leather boots on/Got my girl and she’s a wow” on “Man-Size,” a song widely interpreted as an indictment of masculinity, you can hear her imagining what it would be like to inhabit a typical male body. It is as much a fantasy, and a dark joke, as the B-movie rampage of “50 Ft Queenie.”

Beyond their smattering of angry-woman signifiers, Harvey’s songs are literal performances of gender; they shed light on, poke fun at, and rail against the misery of being trapped by the expectations of femaleness or maleness for one’s entire life. “I never think of myself separately as ‘a woman’—I’m always a musician first,” she told The Guardian in 1993. This is what’s so frustrating about making art as a member of the second sex: You identify as an artist, and trace your lineage to Dylan or Willie Dixon, only to watch helplessly as you’re shunted into the role of “woman artist” the minute your work attracts any attention. If women identify most intensely with PJ Harvey’s music, maybe that has less to do with a set of body parts or political aims than with the unconscious sensitivity we’re forced to develop to the species-wide tragicomedy of gender.

The brilliance of Rid of Me is in the vividness and detail with which it captures that Boschian panorama using only blues rhythms, loud-quiet-loud dynamics, Harvey’s voice (and sometimes that of Ellis, whose falsetto and status as a backup singer constitute additional instances of gender subversion), and an arsenal of extreme characters and loaded allusions. It was that rich, strange, deliberately alienating picture that Harvey attempted to reproduce, not flawlessly but unforgettably, alone on Jay Leno’s stage with her dress and her guitar and her conspicuous lip liner and her startling second voice.

She would investigate feminine archetypes in greater detail on 1995’s To Bring You My Love, naming her sexy alter ego Vamp, clothing the character in a hot-pink catsuit, and slathering her face in gobs of blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. But even then she was exploring gender from the distant perspective of someone who realized that sex was a shared delusion, an arbitrary binary, a sick joke. The one constant in PJ Harvey’s long discography is the mosaic of voices. Listen only to the female ones on Rid of Me, and you’ll only hear one side of the conversation.

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