Friday night’s PJ Harvey show at Wolf Trap was severe enough to reduce you to your senses. The July heat was absolutely smothering, and the music felt every bit as intense, leaving witnesses in a state of open-eared, wide-eyed paralysis. Your best (and only) option was to sit there and take it.

Harvey, on the other hand, had no problem making big moves. With two black feathers stuck in her hair and a pair of military-style boots on her feet, she prowled the stage like a warrior from some otherworldly future, singing in a piercing voice that confirmed her position as one of the greats. When she wasn’t blowing extra heat out of her saxophone, she held it up with her right elbow folded, the way a socialite holds a champagne flute — but with the rest of her posture crouched for combat.

She wasn’t playing war games. Harvey’s latest album, “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” is a rumination on global poverty and endless war, all sung in a mystery-tone that seems to require cold eyes and a hot heart. Her voice first presented its power during “Ministry of Defence,” a rigid, rat-a-tat ode to a crumbling government building in Afghanistan. As Harvey insisted that “this is how the world will end,” theater, journalism and rock-and-roll began to swirl together. A geometric backdrop dramatically rose up from behind her nine-piece band, looking like a Brutalist waffle, or more specifically, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Although it would probably be unfair to think of her top-notch backing musicians as stage props, they fulfilled that role, too. Harvey was leading a little army up there, and whenever her grunts decided to sing along — sometimes as many as six at once — her pleading voice always chimed through like a bell. The troupe included longtime collaborators John Parish and Australian guitarist Mick Harvey — no relation, unless you think of humanity as one big, self-cannibalizing family tree. This was the kind of show that made you wonder about things like that.

Harvey says the “The Hope Six Demolition Project” was inspired by visits to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, and the album’s first track, “The Community of Hope,” caused a stir when local community leaders heard Harvey describe a segment of the District’s Ward 7 as a “drug town” populated with “zombies.” Presumably, the singer’s intention was to show how less-fortunate Americans have been left to rot in the shadow of the Capitol dome, but Harvey’s critics dismissed her observations as poverty tourism. So on Friday, Harvey extended an olive branch of sorts, inviting members of Anacostia’s Union Temple Baptist Church choir to help sing the tune, making the song’s bleak observations and sunny melodies feel even more whiplashing than before.

All of these global concerns made it easy to forget that Harvey was once a radical singer of interiority, and whenever she took a crack at the old stuff with the new band, it was as if she were blasting old secrets out of a new cannon. The devastating refrain of “Shame” from 2004 — “Shame is the shadow of love” — is something elegant enough for Leonard Cohen to have written. Here, Harvey sang it atop her band’s clatter as if she were reading it off a Barbara Kruger billboard. Even hotter: how she and the band re-created the frenzy of 1993’s “50 Ft Queenie” with militaristic precision. Even hotter than that: how they brought the briny allure of 1995’s “Down by the Water” to a rolling boil. And through it all — whether singing about the torrid past or the future of a world on fire — Harvey never appeared to sweat.