For Fans of Trip Hop

Massive Attack's 1991 debut did not sound like anything else that existed. It was hip-hop in its bones but jazz in its lungs, with soul singers, reggae MCs, and a rapper from the Wild Bunch all occupying the same unhurried space. 'Unfinished Sympathy' was the first single and it remains one of the most emotionally complete recordings of the decade: a sample flipped into something that felt newly composed, strings arranged for maximum ache, Shara Nelson's voice cutting straight through. The album opened a door that dozens of artists then walked through.

Dummy arrived in 1994 and Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley had assembled something that felt simultaneously old and wholly modern. The samples were sourced from spy film soundtracks and 1960s jazz records, but the effect was not nostalgia: it was dread dressed as glamour. Beth Gibbons sang like someone who had survived something and was not sure the surviving was worth it. The Mercury Prize that year was deserved, but the prize missed the point: Dummy was not an achievement, it was a mood, and the mood has not expired.

Endtroducing..... (1996) was constructed almost entirely from samples and it sounds like nothing that has come before or since. Where trip hop producers in Bristol were building songs, DJ Shadow was building environments: rooms you could walk into, each with its own weather. The Guinness World Record for the first album made entirely from samples is a factoid, but the real achievement is that it sounds like grief and wonder in equal measure. It influenced producers for twenty years and the debt is still accruing.

Tricky was on Blue Lines and then left to do something stranger. Maxinquaye (1995) is a trip hop record only in the way that it uses the same tools: slow beats, samples, paranoid production. The sensibility is darker and more confrontational. Martina Topley-Bird's voice against Tricky's muttered half-raps created a conversation that sounded adversarial and intimate at once. He has made difficult, uneven records ever since and none of them sound like anyone else, which is exactly what he was aiming for.