Tricky - Maxinquaye

One of the most startling and fully formed debut albums of the 1990s. When Tricky first appeared as a guest vocalist on Massive Attack's landmark 1991 record Blue Lines, there was little to suggest that four years later he would emerge with something as powerfully unsettling and genuinely original as Maxinquaye. Released in February 1995 on Island Records and named after his late mother Maxine Quaye, the album arrived fully formed as a genre unto itself, and the world of music has never quite recovered.

Tricky and his then-partner Martina Topley-Bird, her sweet, ethereal voice the perfect counterweight to his low, mumbled menace, take the listener on a tour of the darkest corridors of the human mind, dealing exclusively in paranoia, obsession, and a suffocating claustrophobia that feels simultaneously nightmarish and strangely seductive. The rhythms are slow and heavy, the production layered and shadowy, drawing from hip-hop, soul, dub, and rock without belonging to any of them. Standout tracks "Overcome," "Hell Is Round The Corner," and "Suffocated Love" merge hypnotically with a hard-rock reworking of Public Enemy's "Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos" and the warped soul of "Abbaon Fat Tracks" to create something that has never been successfully imitated despite countless attempts.

NME named it the fifth greatest album of the 1990s. Rolling Stone included it in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is the record that created trip-hop as a recognizable genre, and remains its definitive statement. Compellingly atmospheric and deeply, quietly brilliant.