In their enlightened way, the Victorians were fond of taking photographs of those considered “deviant” – criminals, lunatics, hysterics – in order to see if their facial characteristics held the key to their nature.

Wearing a puff-sleeved white dress and with a tangle of dark ringlets, on the cover of her seventh album Harvey looks alarmingly like one of those poor unfortunate subjects: a maid who has murdered her mistress, perhaps, or a woman locked away for daring to show passion. Physiognomy and phrenology might have fallen out of favour, but then again, White Chalk has little to do with the modern world.

Harvey has turned away from her guitar towards the piano and exchanged one of rock’s most fearless voices for a gauzy high pitch. It’s not too hard to imagine the resulting songs echoing down the corridors of some grim institution. In fact, it often sounds like the work of a character from 19th-century literature: if Grace Poole had decided to write a record to while away those long hours in the attic it might have sounded like the queasy, high-strung To Talk to You or When Under Ether. At times, it’s Wuthering Heights without the Kate Bush dance-class pretension; at others, songs such as The Piano might have been peeled from behind Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s sinister yellow wallpaper. That’s not to say that this is an act of theatrical ventriloquism: White Chalk is often disturbingly raw and it is easy to make a case for it being Harvey’s best since Rid of Me.

She has been slicker (her Mercury Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) and sounded more frail (the sickly Is This Desire?), but when it comes to rattling your nerves, these new songs come closer than anything since Legs or Hook. The rock’n’roll physicality that a guitar brings has dissipated, leaving behind a disembodied collection of songs, little more than an unearthly voice, fingers striking chill keys. The wail at the end of Mountain, the chill of Broken Harp, these are songs that make a mockery of the adjective “haunting” – they could shatter mirrors and rap tables for real. Yet for a record that is so out of time, so ghostly and pale, so bony and spare, White Chalk is utterly alive to musical possibility.

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