The 12 best Trip-Hop tracks of all time
Trip-Hop
Slowed hip-hop breaks, dub bass and film-score melancholy, made largely in Bristol in the early nineties. Nobody who made it liked the name, and all of them made records nothing else sounds like.
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Massive Attack / Unfinished Sympathy
A full string section over a hip-hop break and Shara Nelson singing for her life. Routinely named one of the best singles ever made, and the claim is not obviously wrong.
Portishead / Glory Box
An Isaac Hayes loop, a guitar that sounds like a broken theremin, and Beth Gibbons delivering the most desolate vocal of the decade. Grim, gorgeous, unrepeatable.
DJ Shadow / Midnight in a Perfect World
Assembled entirely from other people's records and somehow completely personal. Shadow proved sampling could be authorship rather than borrowing.
Massive Attack / Angel
Horace Andy over a bassline that builds for five minutes and then detonates. The moment trip-hop stopped being mellow and started being genuinely frightening.
Portishead / Roads
Barely a beat, a Rhodes, and a string arrangement that arrives like a collapse. The quietest track on this list and easily the most emotionally violent.
UNKLE featuring Thom Yorke / Rabbit in Your Headlights
Six minutes of accumulating dread that resolves into one of the loudest releases in the genre. The Jonathan Glazer video is inseparable from the record.
Sneaker Pimps / 6 Underground
The most straightforwardly seductive record the genre produced, and proof that trip-hop's atmosphere worked just as well attached to an actual pop song.
Massive Attack / Teardrop
A harpsichord, a heartbeat and Elizabeth Fraser singing about grief. The group's third and most fragile masterpiece, and the one that proved the formula was a language rather than a trick.
Tricky / Hell Is Round the Corner
Built on the same Isaac Hayes loop as Glory Box, released within months of it, and utterly unlike it. The clearest available demonstration that in Bristol the sample was a starting point rather than the idea.
Nightmares on Wax / Les Nuits
The warm end of the genre, from Leeds by way of Ibiza. George Evelyn keeps the slowed break and throws out the dread, which turns out to leave something perfectly durable behind.