After releasing a series of exceptional, corrosive alternative rock albums that transformed the mid-1990s musical landscape, English songwriter Polly Jean Harvey followed up with the subtler — but no less potent — Is This Desire?. Harvey leaned more heavily into cerebral electronic touches here, stitching together a gripping collection of stories — many of them about women real and imagined — that also dared to ask a discomfiting question: Is desire alone enough to push a relationship forward?