Tricky

Tricky, born Adrian Thaws in Bristol in 1968, came up through the city's underground in the orbit of Massive Attack, the scene that handed the world trip hop, and in 1995 he stepped out on his own with Maxinquaye. It's a debut that sounds like it was cut at the wrong end of the night with the damp seeping through the walls: murky beats, bass like smoke, samples that loom up and fall away, and Tricky's low, cracked murmur trading lines with Martina Topley-Bird, whose cool, unbothered voice became the other half of his sound for years. "Black Steel" snarls, "Overcome" drifts, and the acclaim that followed brought a Brit nomination for British Breakthrough Act in 1996.

He didn't lighten up. That same year brought Pre-Millennium Tension, home of "Christiansands", plus the Nearly God record he put out under a pseudonym, and both dug deeper into the dark, layered stew of hip-hop, alternative rock and ragga that set him apart from the coffee-table end of trip hop. Keyboards, harmonica, that half-whispered voice: nothing about it was comfortable, and that was the point.

His list of collaborators runs from Björk, PJ Harvey and Terry Hall to Gravediggaz, Grace Jones and Alanis Morissette. Blowback, in 2001, brought "Evolution Revolution Love", and he has kept at it since, with nine studio albums after the turn of the century. In 2016, after a gap of two decades, he was back on a stage with Massive Attack.

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