PJ Harvey
Alternative / Rock
Harvey released her debut single "Dress" on the independent label Too Pure in October 1991. It was voted Single of the Week in Melody Maker by guest reviewer John Peel, who admired "the way Polly Jean seems crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements, as if the air is literally being sucked out of them ... admirable if not always enjoyable". The following spring she released an equally acclaimed second single, "Sheela Na Gig", and her first LP Dry in 1992. At that time she also released a limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dry Demonstration. The trio’s raw, guitar-driven hard rock – which mixed elements of punk, blues and grunge – quickly won rave reviews and a strong cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, with Rolling Stone naming the then-22-year-old Harvey the year's Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer.
She drew fire in April 1992 when she appeared topless on the cover of the British magazine New Musical Express; until then she had been assumed to be unambiguously feminist. Harvey quickly avoided being adopted as a feminist spokesperson, telling Vox that "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it. I'd feel like I really have to go back and study its history to associate myself with it, and I don't feel the need to do that. I'd much rather just get on and do things the way I have been doing them", adding that "I think I'd find it quite patronising to be called a Riot Grrrl if I was one of them, but they obviously don't think so."[2] More recently she told Bust: "I don’t ever think about [feminism]. I mean, it doesn't cross my mind. I certainly don’t think in terms of gender when I'm writing songs, and I never had any problems as the result of being female that I couldn't get over. Maybe I'm not thankful for the things that have gone before me, you know. But I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time." She added, "I don't offer [support] specifically to women; I offer it to people who write music. That's a lot of men."
Harvey then signed to Island Records amid a major-label bidding war. In 1993, she released two albums in quick succession: Rid of Me (engineered by Steve Albini at Pachyderm Recording Studio) with the original trio; and, later in the year, the solo release 4-Track Demos, which contained eight of the homemade 4-track demos that would become Rid of Me alongside six previously unreleased tracks.
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