PJ Harvey has never been one to sit still, and White Chalk presents one of her most fascinating reinventions yet. The punk priestess of Dry and Rid of Me, reborn as the glamourpuss of To Bring You My Love and New York poetess of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea couldn’t prepare listeners for White Chalk’s chilly, ghostly spectre.

Led by piano and simple, thin percussion, White Chalk floats by in a gauzy fog. Appropriately, the album’s first single is the ethereal wisp “When Under Ether,” a meditation on lost life and motherhood. While, at first glance, White Chalk plays out as true minimalism, closer inspection reveals a world of fascinating sounds and details bubbling immediately under the surface. If Harvey’s prior albums were treatises on angry nights, White Chalk captures the earliest rays of a gentle, introspective dawn.

The underwhelming fury of 2004’s Uh Huh Her held the unshakable feeling that Harvey was suddenly playing catch-up, biting at the heels of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs of the world, who’d stolen her thunder. White Chalk appears — dusty, hard to contain within the lines of expectation — on the cusp of another elegantly executed about-face, once again putting Harvey’s pure genius at the forefront.