Onstage, Polly Jean Harvey looks like she drifted in from another world. Dressed in all white, each of her movements is just as quiet, deliberate and precise as the next. Behind her, shadows dance. The audience — which spans across all age groups — watches the revered singer-songwriter with rapt, undivided attention. In all my years of attending live shows, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crowd so deeply entranced.

It’s a gloomy Thursday night in San Francisco, and I’m at the Masonic Auditorium, where Harvey is performing the first of two nights as part of her North American tour, the first in seven years.

I didn’t know what to expect from the elusive 1990s legend on this misty October night: Would we hear her late material about the ghosts of fallen World War I soldiers or songs from the brutal, disarming albums that defined her early career?

Her performance, it turns out, featured both. And everything about it was sublime.

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PJ Harvey performs at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024.

After emerging onstage at exactly 7:59 p.m., she and her backing band opened with tracks from “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” her 2023 album, which she describes as a “sonic netherworld” in a rare interview with the Guardian. This is not a hard-edged rockstar throwing her leg up on an amplifier but a sage storyteller with a cool, calm command over her audience. Even as they screamed belated........

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