[PREORDER] Tricky - Different When It's Silent

Six years is a long time, even for an artist who has never stopped working. Since 2020's Fall to Pieces, Tricky has remained prolific through a series of collaborative and alias-based projects, including the all-star Lonely Guest album, Theis Thaws, and the 2025 release Out The Way with longtime collaborator Marta Złakowska. But Different When It's Silent, his 15th studio album and first full-length release under his own name since 2020, feels like a genuine return to the heart of things.

Recorded between his home in France and sessions in Bristol, the album reconnects directly with the distinctive sonic language that has defined Tricky's work since Maxinquaye announced him to the world in 1995. Fourteen tracks of stripped-back, nocturnal intensity, built around the chemistry between Tricky and a new central collaborator, vocalist Mitch Sanders, whose presence runs through almost every song and whose instinctive feel for the music gives the record a restless, searching quality that suits its title perfectly. Lead single "Out Of Place," featuring Marta, pairs her restrained and eerie vocal against Tricky's urgent, almost punk-like delivery, frenetic drum patterns and mournful strings creating a dynamic that captures the album's stripped-back intensity in a single, powerful piece.

Elsewhere the 14 tracks move through the familiar Tricky terrain of paranoia, loss, and fractured beauty, tracks like "Be Still In The Pain," "So Cold," "Cannon Fodder," and the sparse "Frontier Town" each carrying the weight and atmosphere of an artist who has spent three decades finding new ways to make darkness feel intimate and immediate. "Hengrove Blues," named for the Bristol suburb where Tricky grew up, closes the album on a quietly personal note before "Out Of Place" delivers its final, unsettling punctuation mark.

Available on indie exclusive red transparent vinyl.