Tricky - False Idols

Two decades after Maxinquaye redefined what British music could sound like, Tricky arrived at his ninth studio album having spent years drifting. He says it plainly: "I was lost for ages. I was trying to prove something to people, trying to do something to please other people and also myself at the same time, which is never going to work." False Idols, released May 23, 2013 as the debut release on his own imprint of the same name, is the sound of a man who stopped trying to prove anything and simply made the record he wanted to make. He has since described it as better than Maxinquaye. It is hard to argue.

Finished with his obligations to Domino Records and working for the first time entirely on his own terms, Tricky sounds refreshingly grounded, pairing himself with collaborators genuinely cut from the same cloth. Francesca Belmonte becomes his most essential vocal foil since Martina Topley-Bird, her seductive presence threading through the dark, dubby atmosphere of "Nothing's Changed," "Is That Your Life," "Tribal Drums," and "Hey Love" with the intimacy and precision the music demands. Nneka Egbuna's voice powers the vibrant "Nothing Matters." Fifi Rong brings delicate weight to "If Only I Knew" and the spare, shifting "Chinese Interlude." The Antlers' Peter Silberman lends his falsetto to a stark reworking of his own band's "Parenthesis," transformed here into something considerably more unsettling than the original. "Does It" drives on a steady bass line with a raw, DIY punk directness that references Tricky's origins as squarely as anything on the record.

The album takes its title from the concept of celebrity itself, the false gods of fame and expectation that Tricky had spent years trying to navigate and had finally decided to reject entirely. Three quarters of False Idols belongs with the best work of his career. It earned double silver certification from the Independent Music Companies Association, with sales of over 40,000 copies. More importantly, it sounds like a man who found himself again and was glad to be back.