Queer in their fashion: new releases from indie vets PJ Harvey and SonicYouth are reminders of why gay and lesbian audiences have embraced their sound.

Polly Jean Harvey became a gay icon in the early '90s with her aggressively sexual songs that blurred gender lines--in one song the diminutive Brit blared, "You come on, measure me / I'm 20 inches long," while elsewhere taunting a lover, "You leave me dry." Harvey's new album Uh Huh Her is one of her best, mixing old-school rage and rawness with strong, versatile songwriting.

The varied Uh Huh Her cycles through romantic betrayal, indignation, sorrow, and ferocious anger. "The Pocket Knife," a chilling tune, takes its cues from an ancient antimarriage folk song, "Silver Dagger." In the traditional version a girl's dagger-packing mama vetoes matrimony, but Harvey's love-stung narrator needs no parental prodding. "Can you see my pocket knife? / You can't make me be a wife," she sings in a pain-crazed voice over unadorned guitar chords and tambourine.

"Who the Fuck?" is played on only a distorted guitar and savage, rudimentary drums, recalling the stripped-down salvos of early albums like Dry and Rid of Me. And in the restrained, elegiac "The Slow Drug," physical sounds--Harvey wetting her lips before a line; her breaths; saliva clicking at the roof of her mouth--come through nearly as loudly as the quiet intensity of her voice.

Sonic Youth has also recently made an album reminiscent of earlier work. Having attained the formidable brand age of 23 years, Sonic Youth is now a good deal older than many fans of these art-rock pioneers. Listening to lanky, antimacho guitarist Thurston Moore singing "God is gay ... / God said it's all right / For you to fight--to free your mind" (in 1994's "Androgynous Mind") and tough-woman bassist Kim Gordon's celebration of a badass girl who is unimpressed by boys' attention in 1990's "My Friend Goo," it didn't really matter that Kim and Thurston were married to each other. They were queer role models just the same.

The band's new LP, Sonic Nurse, breaks little new ground, remaining within the familiar dissonant territory charted on the late-'80s classics Sister and Daydream Nation but in more laid-back fashion. This record's feedback-y rock songs are jam-heavy and long--only two clock in under five minutes. But why not play a song for eight minutes if it's a great song? And why not keep playing in the style you perfected in the '80s when it's such a great style? Sonic Youth may be slowing down in middle age, but it's a worthy road the band is ambling along.

Marcus writes about music for Time Out New York and is politics editor at Heeb.