“Sour Times” by Portishead

"Sour Times" is the song from Portishead's 1994 debut Dummy that let America in on the secret, and it's trip hop at its most cinematic: a slow, scratchy beat, a twanging, spaghetti-western guitar and a mood like a noir film running on a warped projector. Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley wrote it together, and the band produced it with Utley co-producing.

Gibbons sings lead, and she's the reason it haunts you: a voice that sounds wrung out and utterly alone, as if she's singing to herself at the end of a very long night. Utley's guitar prowls around her, Neil Solman adds Hammond organ and Rhodes piano, and engineer Dave McDonald keeps everything smoky and close.

It came out as a single in August 1994, backed with "It's a Fire", "Pedestal" and "Theme from To Kill a Dead Man", and Alexander Hemming directed the video. It is still Portishead's only song on the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached 53, their biggest American hit. NME placed it 32 among the 50 best songs of 1994, Spin ranked it second among the 20 best singles of 1995, and in 2011 Slant Magazine put it at 77 among the best singles of the 1990s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.