49 | PJ Harvey

“I often think back to that time when I first got a guitar, when I was 16 or 17,” Polly Jean Harvey told The New Yorker earlier this year. “Prior to that, I’d written lots of words. When I saw that I could put words together with music, I remember it feeling like gates opening, this joy.” That thrill of creation was apparent on PJ Harvey’s game-changing early records like Dry and Rid of Me, on which she wielded her guitar like a jagged weapon; three decades later her playing has become more fluid, yet no less viscerally felt, with her teasing new sounds out of the instrument. “I really don’t have any interest in just doing something I’ve done before,” she said. “What excites me is uncovering something I feel like I haven’t heard anywhere.” —M.J.

Key Tracks: “Missed,” “Autumn Term”

Love “Autumn Term” but how is that her key guitar track lol?