Tricky - Exorcisms of a Black Dandy

Examining an ideal snapshot of the golden age of the Bristol sound through the special map of talents distributed and won, it won't be hard to spot, among esteemed producers (Nellee Hopper), turntable geniuses (Grant Marshall, Geoff Barrow), "important" voices (Nicolette, Shara Nelson) and street artists (Robert Del Naja), an enigmatic black hole, a kid of mixed Afro-Irish blood, with no obvious talent or role, his face gnawed by scars and his expression perpetually "stoned". Charm and apparent swagger are equally on his side, attracting and unsettling in equal measure, mysteriously interwoven in that detached, menacing pose that is also unexpectedly shy. It's perhaps worth zooming in and trying to take a closer look at this shadowy figure.

You see in black and white, feel in slow motion
I drown myself in sorrow, until I wake up tomorrow
The illusion of confusion is not from where I am sat

Memoirs from a House of the Dead

The biography of Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws is marked, from its very first lines, by an unsettling whirlwind of drama and nihilistic impulses: a father who abandons everything and everyone, condemning him to poverty before he's even born, a mother who commits suicide shortly after, a grandmother who takes him into a household steeped in morbidity and violence, school skipped, and an early stint behind bars for some mischief with counterfeit banknotes. All of this in Knowle West, the "white ghetto", also known as Bristol's own Bronx. By the age of fifteen, Adrian already has everything in place for the definitive plunge into the abyss.
Yet if it's true that happiness and misery are held together by an almost perfect balance and compensation, lifelines weren't long in appearing: the emergency exit, for the future tricky kid, comes in the form of paper, weed and an improbable guru. In this way, while a little notebook gives him an outlet for the ideas racing through his troubled psyche, sketching out "lyrics" that hybridize surrealism and adolescent boutades, marijuana anesthetizes him from immediate reality, and the young, now-forgotten star of the Bristol sound, dj Milo, becomes the point of reference who instills in him artistic aspirations, a lifestyle, and all the trappings that usually come with idol worship.
"My parents' generation remembers exactly where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. I remember exactly where I was when dj Milo first played 'Bring The Noise' [by Public Enemy]: St. Paul's Carnival, in Bristol. I was right by the stage when he put that record on, and it was total delirium among everyone there. In that instant, my world changed."

It's through dj Milo, then, that Tricky, barely of age, enters the legendary travelling circus known as the Wild Bunch, presenting himself as a seasoned rapper despite being little more than an amateur, while bringing with him, conversely, years of unusual listening in jazz and synth-pop (Gary Numan, Marc Bolan and Billie Holiday): his talent for unusual lyrics and that cavernous, "ambient" flow make him an indispensable member right away. The transition into the most innovative, prized and cutting-edge core of that experience — the future Massive Attack — is inevitable.
"Blue Lines" is an instant classic, and the trade tabloids start hyping up the expanded quartet, sketching the profile of that fourth, perpetually detached and "absent" element, however smiling and affable he might be when actually approached.
It's the beginning of an extremely complicated relationship with the media and with success, one that would soon turn openly hostile. Tricky feels like an outsider within the rest of the music business. He would state: "I have the feeling that my head is irreparably rotten, screwed up. Since I've been in the music business I've met all these beautiful people, whole, monolithic, completely at one with their own minds. It might just be a facade, but it makes you feel a bit sick when you're not like that yourself."

As is well known, Massive Attack were never an orthodox band — each member, especially in the embryonic phase of this story, pursued his own stylistic path quite independently, only occasionally folding it back into the sound system's overall trajectory.
Tricky gets in touch with Mark Stewart, the unsurpassed post-punk icon of Bristol and beyond, starts turning up more and more often at his squat and begins tinkering with a four-track in that sophisticated recording studio — the first stirrings of what would become "Aftermath".
But an even more important piece of this puzzle is still missing: a fateful encounter, a kind of semi-revelation, a muse. Martina Topley-Bird.
The meeting between the two gave rise to one of the most popular myths of trip-hop: Martina is little more than a teenager sitting with her typical gay friend, celebrating her just-earned high school diploma. The low wall they're sitting on belongs to the Thaws household. Tricky walks up to the two of them and strikes up a long conversation about the most trivial things, until he finally drops the crucial question: "Can you sing?"
The girl replies that she's been a vocalist for a few jazz numbers and some school plays, but that she's actually a fan of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. Tricky doesn't much care either way: a few minutes later, the two of them are already in the studio at Mark Stewart's.
It's the start of an exuberant, passionate, lightning-fast relationship, both in the studio and in private (the two will even have a daughter two years later), to the point that Tricky leaves his then-girlfriend for her. The couple goes back to reworking the tapes for "Aftermath", that Marvin Gaye sample pierced by two basslines and a line from the Young Rascals that Mark Stewart accidentally mumbled in the background. To this is now added Martina's voice, a spontaneously wicked and sultry modulation.
"Aftermath" has pure magic to it, dark and bluesy, shot through with a strange, creedless spirituality, however much it is (or precisely because it is) the product of pure illogic, starting with its indecipherable lyrics. "It's the end of the world. A song about the end of the world. About the end of the world and about my mother's eyes." Adrian will say, quite candidly.
The track apparently thrills only the couple themselves. Mark Stewart reacts with puzzled amusement. Del Naja and Hooper are cold on it and leave the song out of the new Massive Attack and Soul II Soul projects.
A brief moment of discouragement at finding himself isolated ("Working in a band is definitely easier. On my own I'm only good at talking, useless when it comes to actually doing it"), and then finally the decision to go ahead with a solo single.

Aftermath is released in 1993 in a run of 500 copies on 4th & Broadway.
The track gets an excellent response, especially considering the two of them had precisely zero expectations and zero media support. Tricky is, oddly, taken by many to be the pseudonym of a duo (a perception that, with hindsight, isn't actually all that far from the truth), and the trade tabloids aren't slow to swoop rapaciously on this "band", a true gift for anyone hunting for artsy ambitions seasoned with gossip.
Thaws and Martina, however, are already working on new tracks, now backed by a deal with Island, recreating the same process behind "Aftermath" without much difficulty. If anything, even more lopsided. The first result is "Ponderosa", overdubbed gamelan percussion and impertinent vocals. Another generous lungful of smoke. Martina would later recall, with a certain nonchalance: "I have no idea why I came out with that stuff. I tried it a couple of times, but the drunker I got, the more that line kept coming out. So we just decided to leave it as it was."
The studio sessions were indeed akin to real raves, rituals stretched over two or more days straight, in which you drink your soul away and smoke until you collapse, to stick close to a quote from the man himself.
Tricky and Martina grow more and more popular, partly because of the sheer novelty that this style (if you can call it that) brought to the scene at the time, placing them at the forefront of an ideal gap between dance (which Tricky hated), ambient music (reviled by Martina as "stuff for people who are scared, who run from the beat and the heat") and hip-hop. The famous label trip-hop would finally be coined shortly after, to put the magazines' minds at rest.
And it's precisely by riding the sudden media rise of the Bristol sound, driven above all by Melody Maker and NME, that Tricky's debut album would reach a level of success unthinkable in other contexts, outstripping every other, far more established phenomenon of the time, from britpop to the dying embers of grunge.

Maxinquaye compresses his mother's name (Maxine Quaye) into its title, inevitably taking shape as an exorcistic work, a séance meant to clear away the murkiest skeletons of his past and his psyche, anesthetized in a haze of smoke and lust. It is Maxine, above all, who is being summoned in the suffocating whirl of samples and non sequiturs that make up these twelve tracks: she speaks indiscriminately through the mouths of her son and of that unsettling medium Martina turns out to be, oscillating between tenderness ("your eyes resemble mine / you see as no other can", "Aftermath") and flashes of obscene violence ("I fuck you in the ass, just for a laugh/ with the quick speed, I'll make your nose bleed", "Abandoned Fat Track"), all the while triggering a destabilizing blurring of gender (in the blood-red booklet, Tricky appears dressed as a bride, Martina in men's clothing).
The importance of Maxinquaye, though, goes beyond the private obsession of its author — one that will resurface in various guises throughout all his work — and weaves in a set of subtler meanings and themes that are harder to untangle. Starting with what Wire would call tricknology: a true child of his time, Tricky is utterly indifferent to the historic man-versus-machine conflict that, just a generation earlier, had still been a stark dichotomy, including and especially in music. Much like Björk (cf. "The Modern Things"), Tricky takes a compromising stance, neither dismissive nor utopian: machines and technology, for him, have simply always been there, and coming to terms with them is more than natural. A fact that, combined with a consciously borderline personality, can really make sparks fly.
So it's no surprise that tracks like "Strugglin'" come about, a sequence of electric discharges forming an unprecedented pseudo-beat over which Martina can sing and gasp in ecstasy, or the electro delirium of "Brand New You're Retro", hardcore to the point of saturation.
But that same non-dualistic logic prevails across every aspect of the album; its inspirations and musical borrowings dismantle every opposition: white-black, highbrow-popular, electronic-acoustic — slipping into the mix are "Fear Of A Black Planet" and "Hounds Of Love", Prince and Jelly Roll Morton, Augustus Pablo and David Sylvian, Blade Runner and Hinduism.
All of it stirred together in a deeply personal existentialism, traces of which can be felt ("Hell Is Round The Corner", "Feed Me") but which never fully reveals itself in the open.
And so, once again, it's "Aftermath" that acts as the pivot, the ideal center and summary of the whole work, absorbing every impulse of a humanity that lives on quotations, revealing in a single line its most unspeakable secret ("how can I be sure/ in a world that's constantly changing"), happily narcotized in the night, in sex and in smoke.

The success of Maxinquaye is instantaneous: it debuts at number three on the UK album chart without a single radio play, propped up only by the support of a handful of magazines and MTV, which takes an interest in "Overcome", the new single, in which Tricky self-samples "Karmacoma" (to date, his last appearance with Massive Attack), while Q Magazine dedicates a superb profile to him, written by none other than David Bowie — whose "black" alter ego he is, according to a famous piece in the pages of Melody Maker.
Fame comes just as suddenly, and catches Thaws off guard. The step from disorientation to pure irritation is a very short one. Tricky is irritated first by Maxinquaye being received as a lounge-café record, and then by the tabloids that begin stitching onto him the cliché of the angry-posturing black musician, at odds with his far stranger, more ambiguous nature, which prefers lipstick and masks, cross-dressing, to that imagery, making him the first — and probably last — hip-hop-black-dandy in history.
The point of no return, though, comes on Easter Sunday, shortly after the release of the first album: out to grab a bite against the typical early-morning munchies, arriving at the newsstand he notices, mounted on a railing, a giant Time Out poster. Tricky portrayed as Jesus on the cross. On Easter morning. He turns around and doesn't leave the house for three days.

The months following the album's release, however, are extremely intense in terms of both personal turmoil and recording activity. Having split from Martina, with whom he will nonetheless maintain a long and genuine friendship, first Alison Goldfrapp falls into his bed — at that point still just the little-known vocalist on one track of Maxinquaye — and then the fiery, much-talked-about Icelandic singer, Björk, whose story, at this point, has more than one parallel with that of Adrian Thaws, setting up yet another juicy piece of gossip for the press.
Tricky works as a remixer and records several new tracks, drawing on new collaborations and standout duets, often the result of chance meetings on tour, including with Björk herself.

I can’t breathe and I can’t see
Mtv moves too fast, I refuse to understand
You go your way and I’ll see mine
Feels like wasted time

Demons and Angels with a Filthy Face: End-of-Century Tensions

Put together in three weeks, Nearly God reflects and brings to the surface that dark, bluesy mood that on Maxinquaye had still been only a blurred backdrop. The opening track is as symbolic and programmatic as it gets: "Tatoo", a cover of a Siouxsie rarity, performed for the first time by a "singing" Tricky, in a possessed register somewhere between gothic and the most hallucinated Tom Waits. It's a drunken spirituality, in some ways the connecting thread of the album, the search for a higher meaning while his instincts instead pull him down like quicksand.
"Poems" is the jewel of the record in more ways than one: an urban prayer for three voices with Martina and Terry Hall, consoling and decadent as it drags itself quietly along over a constantly looped sample and a bare, bluesy little guitar line. Carrying forward this slow fall are the pitch-black metaphysical monologue of "I Be The Prophet" and the intense soul with thriller-like shades of "Make A Change", the latter featuring Alison Moyet, met by chance one night in a hotel.
Neneh Cherry and Björk are the other notable presences on the record. Thaws and Cherry's friendship goes back a long way, and Tricky wanted to do justice to the "real Neneh", a far cry from the heavy-rotation pop star she was becoming in those years: "Someone who's known hardship and misery, someone who has everything it takes to be Billie Holiday but ends up being Kylie Minogue instead," he would say. The collaboration results in the funky eroticism of "Together Now" and another dozen tracks intended for Cherry's forthcoming album, most of which were cut by her producers for being "too explicit."
Far better known, however, is the affair with the Icelandic singer. Tricky works with Björk on "Post", on "Enjoy" and "Headphones", out of which an intense romantic relationship soon develops. Tricky himself would add a gossipy little footnote: "We were never really a couple in the conventional sense, we were both in a state of semi-breakdown and I think it was more about finding comfort in each other. She has this completely fairy-tale view of life and love, and for the other person that can call everything into question. I was just a coward, and when she asked me 'do you love me?' I answered 'you mean, do I need you?' So we split up."

On Nearly God, Björk appears in the self-sampled "Keep Your Mouth Shut" (formerly "You've Been Flirting Again") and, above all, on "Yoga": Tricky manages to profane the chanteuse in a new, voluptuous duet, as intoxicated as "Ponderosa", as delirious as "Strugglin'", winking at the finest perversions of Lydia Lunch.
The keystone of this portrait of elegant decay, though, remains the same as ever: Martina Topley-Bird, a comforting companion in dissolution and descent toward ruin, able to adapt herself to every whim of his — a sophisticated lady on "Black Coffee", sadistic on "Judas", poetic on the cover of Slick Rick's "Children Story". An indispensable part of the tipsy litanies of Nearly God, nostalgia for a paradise whose location is uncertain but whose necessity is nonetheless deeply felt. The streben is still far from fulfillment.

Only a few months go by before his urges demand a new outlet, this time in their rawest, most uncompromising form. Unlike the two previous records, on Pre-Millennium Tension everything is laid bare on the surface, the tensions revealed head-on, with no chance to look away. The attitude of the hic et nunc, of burning "as if there were no tomorrow", connects to a string of glorious precedents in music, from punk to hip-hop to rave culture, all duly squeezed into forty-six scorching minutes.
More focused on rhythmic solutions than on melodies, Pre-Millennium Tension nonetheless once again sets fire, first and foremost, to the carcasses of memory, from the asthmatic "Vent", another evocation of his mother, to the worst anecdotes of the stardom he had inevitably achieved, like the "devil met in Helsinki" of "Christiansand" (here referring to a journalist), and "Tricky Kid", a cynical, never-more-direct account of his pop ascent in east-coast guise (backing vocals courtesy of the New York collective Hillfiguzes).
Just as concisely, Tricky "explains" the record, recorded during a Jamaican summer: "For a moment I gave myself the freedom to do whatever I want to you. I can kill you, I can beat you, I can mess with your head, I can put a voodoo curse on you. And then 'poof', it's over."
Carnality is once again, above all, lust: "Sex Drive" is a pile-up of base instincts on the verge of blindly exploding, "Bad Things" is electro-blues nymphomania, while "Makes Me Wanna Die" releases all that overexcitement in a brief, almost dreamy spell of ecstasy and gentle sensations.

From an almost-god to an almost-devil, then: Pre-Millennium Tension closes on the melancholy, fleeting notes of "Piano Song": not the proverbial calm after the storm, but rather a feeling of exhaustion, of an anxiety and a lust that have used up every sense, after which nothing remains on the horizon but a dramatic void.
For this reason too, Pre-Millennium Tension is perhaps the most unsettling and "contemporary" offering Tricky delivered to his era.

In the following two years Tricky instead busied himself with the most disparate collaborations, from Yoko Ono to Garbage, by way of Elvis Costello and Terranova, while his impatience with the media and the record industry grew ever more bitter. He would, however, refuse to work with Madonna: "I could only help her sell fewer records and become non-radio-friendly. I'd just like to learn a bit of her visual appeal, looking great and cool even when you know you're not at all, y'know."
During a performance at Glastonbury Festival he lashed out at The Face Magazine, which had long been running indiscreet gossip about the private affairs between Thaws and Martina, suggesting that Tricky played the star while leaving Martina in the role of single mother, as well as the long-standing tag of Tricky as a "demon".

The return to recording instead came in 1998 with the album Angels With Dirty Faces, in Tricky's own intentions a more "conscious and committed" record. The album, paranoid and austere as ever, nonetheless began to show the strain of an already well-worn formula, caught between downtempo moods, feline sensuality (the excellent "Analyze Me") and numerous self-references, occasionally falling into the predictable or the simply dispensable. One important exception does stand out on the tracklist, though: the funeral march of "Broken Homes", an intense duet with a melancholy Pj Harvey, a painful admission of fragility and unease amid swelling gospel, ranking among the finest moments in the whole of Tricky's "tricknological" output.
Angels With Dirty Faces, which met with unexpected success especially on the American charts (Tricky would soon move to New York City, then later to L.A.), also marked the end - definitive? - of the artistic relationship between Tricky and Martina, a painful and consensual split driven by their diverging outlooks and also meant to silence the gossip about the pair's questionable parenting.

Here comes a Nazarene
Looks good in that magazine
Haile Selassie I – they look after I
God will receive us – got me like Jesus

The devil wears mainstream

With the following trio of albums, Tricky seems to shift his music into a more decisive new gear, cleaning up the "smoky" and dark excesses and aiming for a more "pop" cut, even coming to terms with the very mainstream he had always eyed with suspicion until shortly before.
Juxtapose (1999) is the first step in that direction. Put together with producers Dj Muggs and Grease, Juxtapose surprises with a run of catchy, short tracks drawing on funk, rock and above all hip-hop. A good part of the record, though, proves limp and colourless, stacking up insipid tracks when not outright cartoonish (the "metal-mix" of "Hot Like A Sauna"), salvaging itself thanks to a fine middle stretch (the porno-rap of "I Like The Girls" and the downtempo "Call Me" in particular) or when it falls back on safe, tried-and-tested ground, as with the Massive Attack-esque closer "Scrappy Love".
Blowback, from 2001, continues down this road, even more knowingly and shamelessly pop.
Having emerged unscathed from a series of serious health problems (he is said to have even been hospitalised in a psychiatric ward), Tricky explained the project in these terms: "I feel like I spent years moaning about what was playing on Mtv and on the radio. Well, I probably could have kept doing that forever, but if I wanted to hear good music on the radio I just had to make an album that did that."
Hence Blowback, which across its thirteen tracks rounds up vocalists, rappers, pop stars, guitarists and whatever else the mainstream had to offer. If Tricky's aim was in some way to rebuild the song form after having obsessively mangled it, one can conclude by praising the intentions, if rather less the result. The first impression is that each track goes its own way, veering now towards the most radio-friendly heavy-pop-rock ("Girls" and "Wonder Woman", featuring three quarters of Red Hot Chili Peppers), now towards certifiable soft-pop ("Your Name"), now towards a more rapped and markedly "black" trip-hop (the five tracks with Hawkman). What disappoints most, however, is the overall levelling of quality towards the flabbiest mediocrity. "Evolution Revolution Love", "Over Me" and "Five Days" - featuring a revived Cindy Lauper - are the best tracks of the bunch. Which says it all.

After a stint as an actor (in "The Fifth Element"), and the customary two-year gap, along came Vulnerable (2003), a record that seems to have learned the lesson of Blowback, narrowing the guest list down to a single, deliberately obscure singer-songwriter, the Italian Costanza Francavilla. Almost all the tracks are sung as duets, managing, more or less effectively, to recreate the ecstasy of romantic encounter amid sighs and whispers. What fails to improve, though, is the purely musical content, growing ever wearier and more predictable, so much so that, once again, the only redeemable tracks are those that in other times would have amounted to little more than forgotten outtakes, namely the red-light chill-out of "Car Crash" and the sinuous cover of "The Love Cats".

With three albums in a row that were neither convincing commercial successes nor particularly inspired musically, Bristol's loose cannon found himself at a crossroads: redeem his own pen, or lose face for good.

There's no exit - I can't stand still
Keep on runnin'…

Diary of a failed gangster: back to Knowle West

This time a full five years go by. After a long, introspective break away from stages and spotlights, Tricky goes back to digging into his own past, and does so starting first and foremost from the violence of Knowle West. Knowle West Boy (2008) is, from its very title, a mature and self-aware evocation of the past, of childhood and early cultural influences, revisiting scraps of forgotten lyrics, heartfelt and well-deserved tributes (Gil Scott-Heron, The Specials) and a good deal of memories to put in order.
Musically the record finally succeeds where the previous three had failed, namely in happily blending Tricky's typically unusual taste for kneading dry, mongrel beats with a more accessible pop form, this time with both substance and personality.
Though it doesn't boast any particular highlights, the album runs through thirteen lively tracks drawing on private memories ("Council Estate", "Puppy Toy", "Cross To Bear", complete with a renewed Christian metaphor), gangsta tales and politically engaged slogans ("Coalition"), weaving in dub, hip-hop, reggaeton, electro and punk references, and even a deluxe pop cover, the Kylie Minogue-esque "Slow", reinterpreted in trip-garage mode with the trademark lasciviousness of Tricky's duets.
Although it doesn't reach the fervid inventiveness of the glory days, Knowle West Boy nonetheless proves to be an inspired and dynamic album that finally puts our man back on track amid the suffocating jungles of post-millennium pop culture.

Buoyed by the acclaim garnered by Knowle West Boy and by an ever-intense live schedule, Tricky resurfaced in 2010 with Mixed Race, an album that nonetheless gives off an air of mere vanity and half-baked ideas. Despite boasting a mature and sharp set of lyrics, the themes remain the same (the suburban outsider's rise to stardom, the monologues, the guns, the weed, the gangsta violence), and tracks like "Early Bird" would have been worthy of praise had we not already heard the same story told countless times before.
The record also repeats itself in the stylistic choices adopted, largely the Knowle West Boy blend, reactivated half-heartedly and veering into the near-plagiarism of "Kingston Logic" (see Daft Punk). The tracks that work better are instead those that try shifting into blues gear, such as "Every Day" and "Come To Me", confirming the impression that the 2000s Tricky would be far more convincing as a Junior Wells than as a Timbaland.

Rather than an evolution, Tricky's path seems to have turned into a timid retreat down streets already walked. Unable to find a truly convincing new direction, or to further develop the good "contaminated" intuitions of Knowle West Boy, Thaws's remedy is to stir the pot of the old sound he still rules unrivalled, settling, if nothing else, into the comfortable safety of easy success, warding off a fresh failure.

After a brief reunion with Martina, across three live shows revisiting Maxinquaye, 2013 thus saw the birth of False Idols, hailed by many as a return to original form.
The album does indeed distance itself from the more recent efforts, picking back up the genre's most typical devices: samples, slowed beats, cumbersome bass, hypnotic vocals, all arranged within a sonic landscape more polished and classy than ever (perhaps to be linked to our man's farewell to marijuana?). Tricky goes back to doing what he does best, trip-hop, albeit stripped of the mad genius that animated his early works, with no ghosts left to exorcise nor memories to summon with a ouija board, resulting in a pleasant record, bedroom music for a night or two of passion and little else.
Rather than the invective of "original form", False Idols seems to aim, more modestly, at a dark and polished version of Vulnerable: as such, far from contemptible in content, but also easily forgettable without much pang of conscience.

Unfortunately, not even Adrian Thaws, released little more than a year later under the Bristol mixed-race artist's own birth name for the first time, manages to change course. On a cursory listen, it does seem like a summa album, a distillation of everything Tricky has nailed, sensed, dared and stirred up over twenty-plus long years of career: trip-hop, the most jagged and rotten reggaeton, blues, electro-garage, the synth ballad. Styles that surface and somehow coexist across these scant thirty-six minutes. It takes only a little digging, however, to realise that, once again, Tricky appears short of truly incisive, sincere ideas.
Francesca Belmonte remains on vocals for no fewer than four tracks, in what sound like b-sides of an already less-than-memorable False Idols, released only a year and a half earlier, and which can't help but come across as last-minute filler: perhaps the pleasant "Nicotine Love" is spared, a track that on a different tracklist would probably have stood out better with its light, narcoleptic clubbing sway.
The other guest features on the record are Tirzah, Mykki Bianco (though it's only Belmonte's sensuality that saves "Lonnie Listen"), Nneka, co-author of "Keep Me In Your Shake", a number meant to wink at Pre-millennium Tension and some moments of Mixed Race, but which ends up as only a pale blues-pop, and Bella Gotti, who delivers the inevitable quasi-rave turn, complete with the punctual nod to gangsta cliché, and "Why Don't You", which comes across as almost self-plagiarism (the lovely acid-reggae motif of "You Don't", in Maxinquaye territory).
Closing out an album that manages to look rehashed from the cover onward, what remains is a fixed sense of chronic inconclusiveness that our man seems to have been mired in for far too long, along with doubts over the actual necessity of such an episode, in place of a reflective pause or a more extended fermentation of the many ideas Thaws still seems to have.
An interlocutory effort? The definitive end of the black dandy he once was?
Amid the disorientation of post-post-trip-hop, the enigma drags on unresolved.

January 2016 saw the arrival of Skilled Mechanics, thirteen concise tracks, only two of which exceed three minutes, imposing frequent changes of scenery, not so much in terms of sound as in terms of contributors, given the many guests who grace the record with their presence. And while the best days are inescapably behind him, Tricky tries in some way to free himself from the past, striving to offer an interesting mix of (relative) novelty and already-heard material. It's inevitably a record of highs and lows: there's the intriguing narcoleptic pulse of "Don't Go", but also the forgettable synth-pop of "Hero", the meaningful autobiographical verses of "Boy", but also moments where inspiration tends to run a little thin ("Necessary", tellingly tucked away towards the end of the tracklist). Berlin, where he is currently said to reside, probably sparked the idea for the first single lifted from the album, "Beijing To Berlin", a track dense with blackness à la Erykah Badu, entrusted to the voice of Chinese rapper Ivy.
The female features rarely come off badly, and standouts include both "We Begin", handed to the by-now ever-faithful Francesca Belmonte, and the opening "I'm Not Going", with Danish singer Oh Land playing the role of resident Martina Topley Bird: a slow, sensual, enveloping pace over palm-muted guitar. But Tricky's drummer, Luke Harris, also acquits himself admirably, taking lead vocals on two covers: the alluring, piano-and-voice-only "Bother" (originally by Stone Sour), and "Diving Away", a reworking of "Porpose Head" by Perry Farrell's Porno For Pyros. The album is rich in minimal, almost bare moments, like closer "Unreal", and in none-too-vague allusions to trip-hop: "How's Your Life" and "Here My Dear" were conceived leaning on clear Bristol echoes from the 90s. All things considered, while well aware that the electronic avant-garde no longer passes through these parts, Skilled Mechanics will certainly not go down as one of Tricky's worst records.

At the same time, and shortly before the world shut itself into a global lockdown, Tricky tries to translate some of that pain into new material, delegating almost all the vocal parts to the aforementioned Oh Land and to new singer Marta Ziakowska (met during the ununiform tour). The result is Fall To Pieces, which saw the light of day in early September 2020 and recovers the dense, original Bristol mood to give voice to inner turmoil, as is rather evident from the (beautiful) dark textures of "Hate This Pain", "Like A Stone" and "Throws Me Around". What emerges first and foremost from the album, though, is a certain reluctance to descend to the depths the songs foreshadow, as if the pain from which they sprang were too intense to truly approach. Tracks like "Running Off" or "Close Now" serve up atmospheres that would not have looked out of place on Massive Attack's "Mezzanine", yet which stop short just before entering the dimension of true pathos. Taken as a whole, Fall To Pieces surpasses his recent work (at least from Knowle West Boy onward) in terms of clarity of intent, but often feels like a collection of excellent sketches left partly undeveloped. Twenty-five years on from his debut, Tricky remains unpredictable and elusive.

In 2023, Tricky, in collaboration with Polish singer Marta Złakowska, released When It’s Going Wrong. Unfortunately, the album is a skeletal sketch of a handful of electronic backing tracks slapped together with little care, monotonous vocals, and a worrying lack of ideas that's reflected even in the brevity of the songs (9 tracks in 19 minutes). The work, which comes across as little more than a collection of barely sketched-out demos, finds its relatively best moments when it leans darker: the short intro of "Nowhere", with its aching strings, and "Walking", which blends the murkiest trip-hop with r&b-inflected melodies. Marta's voice is tonally somewhat reminiscent of Billie Eilish, but generally comes across as flat and uninspired. Tricky's voice can be heard on "Moving Through Water" and "Walking", always kept in the background compared to Marta's. Some have compared their collaboration to his historic partnership with Martina Topley-Bird, but the comparison is merciless in terms of the quality of the arrangements, the sharpness of the melodies, the atmospheric depth, and the chemistry between the two.

After thirty years spent redefining the language of trip-hop, the most oblique strains of hip-hop, and the most restless side of rock, Different When It’s Silent (2026) isn't a comeback, but something closer to a reappearance.
The tragedy of his daughter Mina's death in 2019 inevitably changed his relationship with the world. In recent years Tricky has "hidden" inside side projects, collaborations and productions, rejecting the very idea of exposing himself. This album, initially conceived as yet another side project, exists only because someone reminded him that these songs inevitably carried his name. But that's precisely the paradox: "Different When It's Silent" is the record where our protagonist is least present as a voice, yet most present as a spirit.
The melodic weight is handed almost entirely to Mitch Sanders, a young singer from Bristol who doesn't just interpret these songs but inhabits them. His luminous falsetto seems to drift through the city's industrial buildings, while Tricky's voice remains a whisper accompanying him like a ghost. If "Maxinquaye" was the diary of a man at odds with the world, here that same man observes the world after having crossed the abyss.
This is one of the most compact works of his recent career. The Bristol Sound keeps resurfacing, but like a memory almost warped by time. The trip-hop foundations remain intact, with post-punk and alternative-rock grafted on top to create a kind of skeletal blues punctuated by sudden electronic openings. "I Still See Me There" moves like a funeral march, "I'm Yours" is tinged with a subdued rock that carries unresolved industrial tension, while "Because I Don't Know" pulls everything back into an electronic haze where pain and groove coexist. Every arrangement seems built to leave room for absence: isolated pianos, spectral organs, violins that never seek consolation, only a different shape of unease.
Some will inevitably miss a more central Tricky, closer to the era of "Pre-Millennium Tension". It's an understandable objection, but perhaps it misses the point. This record isn't trying to replicate an identity built thirty years ago. It wants to prove that a voice can survive even when it chooses to retreat into the background. Tricky remains an artist impossible to imitate: not because he invented a genre, but because he keeps turning his own scars into a language that belongs to him alone.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Skilled Mechanics"), Paolo Ciro ("Fall To Pieces"), Alessandro Mattedi ("When I's Going Wrong"), Ljós Berinn ("Different When It’s Silent")

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