Review: British rocker PJ Harvey challenges, then rewards Minnesota fans in long-awaited return

She never had a big radio hit or widespread MTV play. She hasn’t experienced any kind of TikTok- or soundtrack-driven career resurgence of late, like some of her ‘90s peers. So going into Wednesday’s show at the Palace Theatre, it was uncertain if a PJ Harvey concert in Middle America in the year 2024 is still a big deal.

Turns out, it most certainly is.

On her first U.S. tour in seven years, the British alt/art-rock singer not only packed the historic St. Paul theater, but she put on a show that was big in every way, starting with the ambition level.

The 105-minute set began with a nearly 45-minute performance of Harvey’s entire new record, “I Inside the Old Year Dying” — an album almost as challenging to listen to as its title is to correctly remember. Its music is subdued, quietly orchestral and more mysterious than a lot of Harvey’s other fare. Its witchcrafty and medieval lyrics were inspired by an epic poem the singer wrote. Not exactly fodder for an epic rock ‘n’ roll show.

As a sign of how excited and invested Minnesotans were in having Harvey back in town, though, the crowd stayed respectfully quiet and attentive through the entire album performance, no small feat at the Palace, with its standing-room-only general admission floor.

Harvey, 54, truly put on a performance of the record. She twisted and turned out dramatic dance moves in the frayed, Tom Waits-ian “The Nether-Edge.” She moved in and out of eerie, artful white stage lighting throughout the new material. All four of the men in her band — including longtime collaborator/guitarist John Parish — helped her sing the experimental acoustic dirge “I Inside the Old I Dying” for a feel-good moment amid the dark material.

Like a true performance artist, Harvey never spoke to the crowd throughout the album’s entirety, as if singing in character. Things got a little kooky at times — with one too many bird-chirping recordings involved — but overall it proved a daring and memorable start to the show.

Harvey rewarded fans’ receptiveness with a more conventional and full-volume second half. Of course, her poetic and musically jagged older material is still far from conventional, especially here in America.

She delivered several songs off her underrated 2011 album “Let England Shake,” a reminder she’s a truly British-themed British songwriter in the vein of Kate Bush or the Kinks’ Ray Davies. One of those songs, “The Colour of the Earth,” was actually sung by her bandmates to kick off the second half as she took a short breather — which seemed unnecessary, since she was in strong voice all night.

Toward the end, Harvey reached further back to some of her more bombastic, snarling, patriarchy-baiting ‘90s songs such as “Down by the Water,” “To Bring You My Love,” “50ft Queenie” and “Man-Size.” She made no mention of the fact that those latter two songs came off 1993′s “Rid of Me,” an album she famously recorded in rural Minnesota at Cannon Falls’ Pachyderm Studios with noise-rock guru Steve Albini (to whom she dedicated one song two nights earlier in his hometown of Chicago).

It was a thrilling final run of songs. None of those older nuggets were major radio hits, it’s true. Regardless, they sounded bigger and hit harder than a lot of the other ‘90s rock songs we’ve heard in a year heavily filled with Gen-X nostalgia concerts. You could hardly call Harvey’s two-part show nostalgic, too.