Tricky - Different When It's Silent

Fifteen Albums In, The Bristol Maverick Picks Up A Guitar

Of all the figures that emerged from the Bristol trip-hop scene of the early nineties, Adrian Thaws has always been the least predictable. Massive Attack, the band he briefly called home, have not released a new album in sixteen years. Portishead fell silent after 2008's Third. But Tricky has never stopped. Different When It's Silent is his fifteenth studio album under his own name, and if that number seems improbable for an artist who once seemed like he might burn out before he turned thirty, the record itself makes the persistence feel not just justified but necessary.

The last Tricky album was 2020's Fall to Pieces, a record shaped by devastating personal loss. His daughter Mazy died in 2019, and that album charted a grief so raw and so deep that it was uncomfortable to listen to, in the way that witnessing someone else's pain always is. Different When It's Silent does not leave that grief behind. Tricky has said that Mazy's presence is all over the record, and you can feel it in every corner, in the lyrics about pain and persistence, in the desolate textures, in the way the album seems to be reaching for something just out of grasp. But where Fall to Pieces was submerged in sorrow, this record fights its way up for air. Tricky has described himself as emotionally paralysed after Mazy's death. Different When It's Silent is the sound of the paralysis breaking.

The most significant change is the sound itself. Tricky has called this his first indie rock album, and he is not exaggerating by much. The electronic production that defined his earlier work, the dubby textures and spectral beats that made Maxinquaye sound like nothing else in 1995, has been largely replaced by live drums and electric guitars. The first half of the record, in particular, is dominated by fuzzy, overdriven guitars and propulsive rhythms that recall the post-punk of his youth rather than the trip-hop he helped invent. On Paris Maybe, the combination of ragged guitars and Sanders' soaring falsetto makes it feel like Tricky has essentially made a modern post-punk record, with only his own spectral vocal rasp lingering in the background to remind you that something stranger is afoot.

Sanders is the key to the album's sound. His voice is almost an instrument in itself, a ghostly falsetto that lends an extra dimension to everything it touches. On the opener I Still See Me There, his falsetto drifts over a downbeat post-rock backdrop, mournful and anchored in the past, and the track comes across like the soundtrack to a ruin. It is a 7/8 crawl through a desert of pure sadness, opening with the line make me want to die, a familiar phrase from the Tricky songbook, and it only gets more desolate from there. The contrast between Sanders' pure, almost angelic delivery and the darkness of the material is what gives the album its tension, and it is a tension that holds for most of the record.

Not everything works. The second half of the album is dominated by awkward experiments, and Tricky is still going to Tricky, after all. The hokey stomp of Frontier Town, which features vocals from Alan McGee's one time LA chauffeur Christian Pattemore, feels misplaced, a curiosity that interrupts the flow rather than adding to it. Hengrove Blues, with its acoustic whimsy and delicate falsetto, is pretty but slight, a track that drifts past without leaving much behind. For all the inspired touches, Samantha Rowe's operatic vocals on Piano, the violin and cello that give Marinade its neo-classical backdrop, you wish at times that Tricky would tighten the focus and let the stronger material carry the weight.

And the stronger material is strong enough to carry almost anything. I'm Yours is grungy and mirror deep, a track that channels PJ Harvey at her most feral, with Sanders' falsetto cutting through the distortion like a knife through fog. Be Still in the Pain is a tortured street-soul torch song, all the more desperate for its incongruously upbeat drums, and it comes close to matching the devastating Hate This Pain from Fall to Pieces. Because I Don't Know is fuzzy rock with a ragged soulfulness, Sanders asking can you feel my pain, do you feel the same, while Tricky's whisper lurks in the background like a shadow that refuses to leave.

Then there is Out of Place, the album's closer and its centrepiece. Marta Złakowska, whose Martina Topley-Bird-esque whisper has been a fixture of Tricky's recent work, takes the lead vocal for the first and only time on the record, and the result is one of Tricky's best songs in years. It is a thundering mixture of distorted guitars, throbbing synth, opulent string lines, and an undercurrent of rage that builds and builds until Tricky himself cuts through with the declaration I Sing for My Daughter. It is the moment where the album's grief and anger and stubborn will to continue all converge into something that feels less like a song and more like an exorcism. When his voice finally breaks through Sanders' falsetto and Marta's whisper, it gives the album a venom that the rest of the record only hints at.

Different When It's Silent is not a perfect record. It is stylistically uneven, and there are stretches where the experiments feel more stubborn than inspired. But it is an urgent, visceral one, an act of catharsis that Tricky clearly had to make. After the darkly desperate Fall to Pieces, this punchy, punky album is further evidence of a career renaissance rooted in emotional power and musical exorcism. Tricky has said he is ready to start his life again, that he is looking forward to touring and recording, that he was emotionally paralysed and now he is moving. You can hear that movement in every bar of Different When It's Silent. It is not always graceful, but it is always honest, and after thirty-one years, that honesty still cuts deeper than almost anyone else's.