Rid of Me is PJ Harvey at her most feral, recorded live to tape by Steve Albini in a Minnesota barn. It’s the sound of a woman dismantling expectations with a Telecaster and a head full of fury. If you only hear one album from 1993, make it this one.
The first time I heard “Rid of Me” I was in a car with a blown speaker, and it still sounded like a threat. The snare cracked like a gunshot, the guitar hissed and rang, and Harvey’s voice moved from a whisper to a snarl in the space of a single verse. That car was a junker, but the album wasn’t.
Steve Albini recorded Rid of Me in February 1993 at Pachyderm Recording Studio, nestled in the woods of Cannon Falls, Minnesota. The band—Harvey on guitar and vocals, Rob Ellis on drums, Steve Vaughan on bass—played together in one room, no headphones, no baffles. Albini later said he just opened the console and let the air move through the tracks. “No one was trying to make a commercial record,” he told Sound on Sound years later. “We were trying to make a mean record.”
They succeeded.
The title track opens with a clean guitar figure that sounds almost polite before it gets yanked into a chorus of distorted agony. Harvey’s lyric “Don’t you put on that dress / Don’t you put on that dress” alternates between command and plea, and the band follows her like a pack. Ellis’s drums are roomy and huge—Albini placed a Blumlein pair of ribbons in the center of the room plus close mics—and Vaughan’s bass is a low, woolly anchor. Nothing was fixed in the mix later. What you hear is what they played.
I’ve never heard an album that captures the feeling of being cornered and deciding to bite back with such precision. “Man-Size” struts on a riff that’s almost macho, but Harvey undercuts it with lines about wearing a Gucci dress and feeling “belittled” in a man’s world. The chorus explodes into a release that still gives me chills. “50 Ft Queenie” is a carnival barker’s boast run through a Marshall stack. And the cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is slowed to a crawl, treated like a skin-crawling ritual.
The recording itself has a palpable physicality. Albini’s trademark multi-mic setup—sometimes three or four microphones on a single guitar amp—caught the room’s ambience along with the direct signal. You can hear the floorboards creak. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke. It’s an album that never lets you forget it was made by people in a room, not faceless layers on a screen.
Twenty years later, it still sounds like it’s about to break.