A happy Polly Harvey was as unlikely a prospect as Slipknot unplugged — until her 2000 surprise crossover hit, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. Celebrating both New York and new love, it even gave us the improbable sound of Thom Yorke singing, “I dream of making love to you now, baby.” So do Harvey’s uncommonly high spirits extend to Uh Huh Her? A cursory glance at the track listing, which includes “The Darker Days of Me & Him,” suggests not.

Whether because of reservations about the slickness of Stories or upheavals in the love life she keeps private, Harvey is revisiting the tormented terrain of her earlier work. For an album almost four years in the making, it’s frustratingly half-finished, like a series of preliminary sketches. Of the 13 songs in 41 minutes, too many are mere squibs. Petulant and scrappy, “Who the Fuck?” would struggle to pass muster as a Yeah Yeah Yeahs B-side.

Despite Uh Huh Her’s fitful progress, Harvey’s charisma is still electric. She was stripping the blues down to their nerve endings back when Jack White was still restoring furniture in Detroit. “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” lurches along on a riff that might have been dredged up from a swamp, and the stark contempt for nuptial bliss in “The Pocket Knife” (“White material will stain”) has an eerie, ancient power.

However reductive the tag may be, Uh Huh Her unfolds as a breakup album. Harvey is bruised and broken on “Shame” (“Shame is the shadow of love”) and tortured by memories on the hellish “Cat on the Wall.” By the final song, “The Darker Days of Me & Him,” she’s promising to “pick up the pieces and carry on somehow.” If Johnny Cash were still alive, the quiet, hymnlike majesty of “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” would cry out for his Bible-black tones. The title is halfway between a puzzle and a giggle, but nobody’s laughing here.

DOWNLOAD THESE “The Pocket Knife,” “It’s You,” “The Desperate Kingdom of Love”