You’ll be sitting there, clutching your watered down bourbon, wondering what you did her wrong but it just feels like your actions have become exactly what you like to drink, watered down, weak and ineffective.

Harvey has an amazing ability to knock you for six with the subtlest of whispered lyrics.

After going back over the highs of her last album, the angry guitar driven arguments that we all know her for, this is almost like the realisation that the indecent love affair is over and the actions of the previous night become clear, awkward in places but woefully true and daunting.

It’s overwhelming dark and atmospheric, the hauntingly eerie piano accompaniment echoes Polly’s voice in the best possible way, if you cut the skin of this album, you’d find nothing but the ashes of a labour of love.

Instead of her usual strings-heavy backing, she’s moved onto a Piano-based accompaniment with even the high production values not being able to detract from the depressive downer heard from the on-set of the album.

Even the photography of the album serves to settle the most hesitant fan, renewing her relationship with artist Maria Mochnacz, who previously worked with Harvey on Rid of Me, capturing the well-known wet-look she sported for the album cover.

Ever since the clean, produced sound of her first album Dry, the only way to describe her eighth studio album White Chalk is that of a rustic melody being played through the world-weary strings of a trusted acoustic guitar.

The combined work of John Parish, Eric Feldman and Jim White serve to give body and soul to the written music that Polly offers to her listener, the lyrics still rest easy but unsettle just enough to make you wonder what she wants you to believe.

Though she is one to not write biographical lyrics, one slips by as an ode to how much she misses her Grandmother, a sign of someone that’s no longer ill at ease with herself but comforted by her own music.

The production of this album just proves how Polly will never, ever be part of the mainstream music press. Her ability to change from one output to another with the flick of some invisible switch means that no conventional music lover will be able to except the pace at which she changes.

Considering the first single When Under Ether feels like the most-produced track, it reminds the listener a lot of the content of To Bring You My Love, by slowly pulling the earnest obsessive of her work into her new project and the additional instruments just build the tension until you realise it is no more.

Even though White Chalk provides the underlying theme for the LP, comes off as low-key, with its lyrics conjuring up dark images and stunted silences that deserve only to be lived through once thus setting the bleak and ominous tone that reverberates through it. 

Not one to forget ambience, Silence is a slowly building yet soothing ballad that draws you towards an uplifting conclusion that just doesn’t want you to know its there, until it reaches its pinnacle and needs for you to know that it exists.

This leads mournfully into, To Talk to You, a staggered drunken walk past memories once know and then forgotten, the piano recites this theme throughout and the vocals just meander harmonically around your senses which takes hold of you prior to Before Departure, that captures the slow, alcohol fuelled trip of despair with the lost hope of a dear love leaving for foreign climates.

The percussion just serves to illustrate the frustrating steps you take back to the life they have left.

It almost feels as if it was written to be an acoustic only session, but more depth was needed. The only way to describe her work is as if it was made to score a photograph album, each song takes a different photograph and pulls it apart until you’re left with the raw negative of its creation.

Sad in a way, as you’re left more apart then together by the end of the album, but then again, those that listen aren’t here to be lifted but to enjoy the emotions that leave us to dry our eyes at the end of that forbidden night.