A little while ago, I was listening to PJ Harvey’s library on shuffle on my work commute. As usual, I was hooked by her power, her poetry, her voice, and her versatility, but I was especially struck when “Long Snake Moan” transitioned into “Dear Darkness”. The switch from the former (from 1995) to the latter (from 2007), separated by more than a decade, and also separated by miles of musical territory, left me awed. How one person could go from the aggressive, noisy snarl of “Long Snake Moan” to a song as soft and wounded as the piano-led “Dear Darkness” was a thing of shocking beauty, even with the 12 intervening years.

Harvey’s variation from album to album, sound to sound, world to world, is long known by now. But in 1995, when her third album, To Bring You My Love, came out, she was mostly known for a guitar-centric, alternative rock sound. There was a certain grunginess to much of her work, and for as a brash and angular as many songs from her first two records — 1992’s debut Dry and its 1993 successor Rid of Me — were, there was a certain relationship between the tracks that made them feel more obviously of a piece. They even felt rather of the time when you look at other similar releases from the early 90s alternative scene.

But even though there was some sonic or compositional variation (see “Plants & Rags” vs “Dress”, or “Rub ‘til it Bleeds” vs “Man-Size”), the tracklists didn’t necessarily foretell the wild excursions, surprising left turns, or hairpin sonic costume changes to come down the line.

Released on February 27, 1995, To Bring You My Love was the first hint of that, and while it is sometimes dwarfed by the electric light of its predecessors (especially Rid of Me), Harvey’s third album is, somewhat stealthily, truly her best work, her crown jewel, her real magnum opus.

Coming off the heels of Rid of Me (often cited as her best), Harvey skirted expectations right away. Both that album and her debut were gnarly, kind of lo-fi, and had bone-dry production that laid her songs terribly bare, in a way that mostly suits them. “Rid of Me” has an iconic chorus that hits precisely because of the thinness of the song’s production; “Man-Size Sextet” has a certain unsettling undercurrent because of the song’s sonic wooziness; the shouted "ha!" before the final chorus of "Missed" lands like a bomb before the song's rousing finale. There is a quiet-loud dynamic that Harvey plays with repeatedly, helped especially on that album by the late, great producer Steve Albini.

But on To Bring You My Love, Harvey returns to the production deck. She co-produced her debut with Head and Rob Ellis, but on TBYML, she worked alongside Flood and John Parrish, who would both become her frequent collaborators. (They even co-produced her most recent record, the eerie pastoral folk narrative I Inside the Old Year Dying.) She also disbanded the original PJ Harvey Trio that made up the band of those first two LPs.

On her third album here, it’s clear Harvey was ready to shake up her sound. It was the first time we heard her songs in a more hi-fi, cleanly produced way. If a song like “Down By the Water” had wound up on an album like Dry, it would never have sounded so slick, so pristine, so upfront. But on this album, its slinky electronic chug and call-and-response vocals feel like such a natural fit for Harvey, as it becomes clearer with each track of the album what a skilled chameleon she was becoming (or maybe always was).

It doesn’t start in bright lights, though, as the album picks up with what would become one of Harvey’s signature songs. The album’s title track pulls a slightly similar trick to Rid Of Me’s opening title track, where the album sort of creeps in on a quiet bed of sound, unsettling the listener and setting them up for some kind of shock or turn. On “Rid of Me”, it’s that brazen, blistering chorus atop blaring guitar (“Don’t you wish you never never met her!?”) but here, it’s a slowly encroaching sense of dread. The song exists on a loping, slow, cycling guitar lick that barely changes across its five minutes. It takes a while to reach full volume, and then it stays there, the only shifts being a couple potent strums. A spooky organ sneaks in eventually, but the main crests are from Harvey’s voice, which goes from a low snarl (“I was born in the desert / Been down for years” — the first half of that couplet a direct quote of a Captain Beefheart song) to a vibrato-heavy, dramatic ululation (“To bring you my looove!!!”). It’s an austere and humid song, but not as airless as her previous work, and there’s a certain theatrical flourish to it that portends much of what’s to come.

This initial salvo is the album’s most slow-motion, creeping moment, but To Bring You My Love goes in all sorts of directions from there. “Meet Ze Monsta” is a brittle rocker, and probably the most akin to her prior work. “C’mon Billy” is an acoustic cut with a fleet-footed strum and a passionate vocal. The aforementioned “Long Snake Moan” is a huge, noisy rocker, with a guitar thrust that sounds like it draws a direct line to Garbage’s debut album (which came out a few months later in the year). “Teclo” is a lovesick ballad, with woozy keys and a pleading chorus. 

It’s so interesting to see what Harvey did with more money and more hi-fi production. She doesn’t give us sleek pop rocker after sleek pop rocker (the closest she’d come to that wouldn’t happen until 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea), instead favoring a hodgepodge approach, keeping the listener on their toes. How does a song like “C’mon Billy”, with its relatively straightforward acoustic strut, come right after a song like “Working for the Man”, which almost solely lives upon a steady beat and a super-low, groovy bass keeping it rooted. Here, Harvey’s voice sounds like it’s been smooshed under glass, its low end ticked up, and eventually, some dreamy, watery guitars float across the canvas. At the end, in the final milliseconds, she lets out a little nonverbal sound that is somehow impossible to describe, and then “C’mon Billy”’s bright acoustic guitar picks up immediately.

It’s hard to convey how weird this transition (and frankly a lot of the sequencing here) is, and yet somehow it works — this album even led to Harvey’s first pair of Grammy nominations (she’s gone on to receive a total of eight, somehow winning none).

Later, “I Think I’m a Mother” creates a thick soup of nocturnal sound and low-end vocals, with Harvey doubling down and putting on some kind of voice, as if she’s playing a different part, a different character. How is this the same singer we just heard slithering through “Down by the Water”? (This album does stand as an early example of her ability to switch vocal styles and take on characters — just check later cuts like “April” to see more.) Then she pleads for love on “Send His Love to Me”, over guitars that don’t sound too dissimilar from “C’mon Billy”’s, but are struck with more vigor, almost flamenco-like, her voice more fiery, insistent. The album then closes with “The Dancer”, which has some of her oddest vocalizations on the album, including a bridge that sees her voice practically exploding in ecstatic feeling. It’s almost orgasmic. It’s bizarre, torchy, and dramatic, and feels like a fitting conclusion.

These wild swings are the bread and butter of this record, and go so far to show what a masterful artist Harvey was (and continues to be). To Bring You My Love is, on its face and on its genre listings, a rock album, maybe even an alternative one, but it feels like so much more than that. Especially coming so closely after her opening one-two punch of intense, fiery, and dry-as-hell rock songs, her third album was a cracking open of her own sound and its possibilities. Albini’s work with her on Rid of Me laid her sound bare, its bones showing through its barely-there skin, but her work on To Bring You My Love introduced the world to her eclectic side, her unpredictable side, her mercurial nature rearing its head for the first of many times.

It’s not a surprise, in light of a record like this, that she wound up making albums as odd as Is This Desire?, or as raw as Uh Huh Her, or as skeletal and out-of-left-field as the piano-driven White Chalk. In 2011, she released her folky Let England Shake, which featured some ghostly and old-time-y folk instrumentation and melodies, with imagistic poetry of war and pain. The mode she landed on here would sort of stick, not being as many worlds away from her next two records (The Hope Six Demolition Project and I Inside the Old Year Dying) as we were accustomed to. 

But even there, she wasn’t exactly repeating herself; her sound and style from album to album has always been a bit hard to anticipate. In fact, one of the most surprising albums in her career was Stories in 2000, precisely because of how glossy it was. It remains her most pristinely recorded and most straightforward rock record, but PJ Harvey, by that point her career, doing a record like that, was in itself surprising.

She’s an artist who doesn’t settle, who follows her own whims and her own ideas, and — as is incredibly evident on I Inside, with its reliance on the at-times-indiscernible language — never cows to expectations or norms. And while she was already doing her own thing the moment she arrived, it wasn’t until To Bring You My Love that it became clear what a complete hold she had of this power. It’s no accident that “Long Snake Moan” ends, at about the exact midway point of the record, with her shouting, “Is my voodoo working?” She already knows the answer.

You can see some seeds of a lot of her future endeavors in the DNA of this album. You can hear Is This Desire?’s electronic textures and bold daring in the scrape of songs like “I Think I’m a Mother” or the odd thrum of “Working for the Man”. You can hear Uh Huh Her’s acoustic, insistent alt-folk in tunes like “Send His Love to Me”. You can hear a whiff of the wailing exorcism that concludes White Chalk in the passionate vocalizations of “The Dancer”. The whispering of “Down By The Water” anticipates the windswept “The Wind”. There’s enough to spin your mind in a million refracting directions; you can see this record as a foreshadowing of almost all that was to come, boiled down into a 42-minute microcosm, a hall of mirrors, a spinning top always risking a fall but never succumbing to the gravitational push. In this sense, TBYML is almost like her version of Bjork’s Post, another album that made its predecessor look tame and almost “normal” in comparison, but saw an artist fully embracing their own creative mien, in all its colorful, juxtaposed permutations.

PJ Harvey’s discography has always been a high-wire act, careening from loud rock to quiet balladry to spectral folk and back; from hard truths about love and lust to war imagery and imagined characters coming of age in some nightmarish wood; from barebones production to luminous radio-friendly rock to spacious and eerie rustic vistas. Her choices are hard to pin down and sometimes hard to understand, and almost always impossible to expect, but therein lies both the challenge and the joy of an artist like Harvey. It’s not often that a musician with her breadth of skills and interests makes a career as long, storied, and consistently acclaimed as hers while remaining true to her diverse creative identity. It’s no fluke that she remains the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice.

There are several artists across time who are bestowed the descriptor "chameleonic," but few have earned it as wholly as Harvey. The eclecticism in her work has never betrayed anything besides a deep creativity and a fondness for pushing oneself out of whatever comfort zone you’ve most recently built around yourself.

And just like some of pop's biggest stars and auteurs (think Lady Gaga, Bjork, and many others), Harvey has spent her career going through "phases" or "eras," with almost every album cycle being marked by a different aesthetic approach to the visuals. There's the DIY punkster of Uh Huh Her; the spectral Victorian dresses of White Chalk; and To Bring You My Love had her infamously made-up face, donning the heavy blue eye shadow and bright red lips. Visuals have always slyly been an integral part of Harvey's appeal and of her artistry. (It's perhaps no shock that, in addition to music, Harvey is also an accomplished painter, drawer, and sculptor.)

But she isn’t simply a fickle artist unable to decide what she’s good at, and even her most daring choices have paid dividends (to me, it’s a mark of success when an artist with as many albums as Harvey can lead to endless discussions over which of hers is your favorite). When you throw on a PJ Harvey shuffle or playlist, you can expect the unexpected, and that magnetic unknowing is one of her brightest gifts.

To Bring You My Love was an early signal — essentially a “Look what I can really do” — that has withstood the test of time. Its adventurous and zigzagging spirit, impressive and muscular musicality, beautiful and raw and surprisingly-indelible sense of melody — it all coalesces to make a record that may be less consistent than Rid of Me or Dry, but is richer, wilder, and all the more impressive for sticking such a tricky landing. 30 years on, it’s lost none of its luster, and continues to be a symbol not only of PJ Harvey’s vitality within the musical world, but also how adept she was at creating her own.