“I can’t believe life’s so complex / When I just want to sit here, and watch you undress.” So sings PJ Harvey on her 2000 track “ This is Love ”. She’s wearing a whipped cream-coloured suit jacket in the video, tassels dangling off her sleeves, arms cradling an electric guitar. Then she turns to the camera, eyelids cloudy with gold dust, and drawls: “This is love, this is love, that I’m feeling.” It's the sort of thing that makes you want to whisper "what a powerful way to enter the millennium," to yourself.

PJ Harvey—real name Polly Jean—has always occupied a strange place in the music conversation. On the one hand, her influence can be felt everywhere. You can hear her bleak, grey-blue tones in bands like Bat For Lashes and Warpaint. You can see her slash of red lip and low slung guitar in St Vincent and Anna Calvi. Her dark, lyrical style and heavy riffs ripple throughout so many artists' sounds, from Sharon Van Etten to The Kills and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

But she’s also never been fully embedded within the mainstream. Sure, she’s accumulated a long line of award nominations—seven Grammys, eight BRITS, the only artist to receive the Mercury Music Prize twice. She’s even been appointed an MBE. But you’re not about to see her throwing out gags on 8 Out of Ten Cats, or showing up in the showbiz section of the Mail Online. Her tracks don’t often scrape the top 40, and she’s had one chart-topping album. In that way, she’s neither an obscure/cult figure, nor globally recognized. She sits somewhere in between. She’s timeless, her own force.

Taking a trip through PJ Harvey’s nine studio albums (11 if you count her collabs) is like wading through a black lake at night, if that lake lived inside your soul. She sings relentlessly of water and drowning, of sex and romance, of cities and seasides and nature. Her guitar lines are open and lush; sometimes grungy and pummelling, other times so held back you can barely hear them. Like a poet, PJ Harvey knows how to work with space and tension. “You shoplifted as a child / I had a model's smile...” she sings softly and deadpan in “We Float,” before the whole thing blooms and transforms completely, a new song within a song.