PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey grew up on a sheep farm near Yeovil in rural Dorset, the daughter of a quarryman and an artist mother, learning guitar and saxophone before she had any obvious use for them. She formed her first trio in 1991 and spent the next three decades methodically surprising everyone, including herself. Steve Albini-produced blues-rock gave way to hushed piano records, anti-war song cycles, and the folk-threaded, field-recording-laced sound of her 2023 Grammy-nominated album "I Inside the Old Year Dying." She is the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice - for "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" in 2001 and "Let England Shake" a decade later. An MBE holder and published poet, she released the orchestral single "Voyager" in June 2026, taking its name from the NASA probes still drifting through interstellar space nearly fifty years after launch.