“Gloriously original, its power to intrigue, disturb and seduce remains undiminished three decades on”: This 1995 album contains hip hop, dub, soul, industrial and ambient music. And it’s very, very prog

Today’s musical headlines would have it that the mid-90s were fuelled solely by the brash hedonism of Britpop, but this is to willfully ignore the new musical eclecticism that followed in the wake of rave’s huge impact against the backdrop of a country increasingly disgusted with political sleaze and scandal. And it’s here that Maxinquaye slunk in with the stealth of cat returning from a night of nocturnal mystery. Tricky’s debut solo album, named after his mother Maxine Quaye, was immediately at odds with the guitar-led purveyors of the day as it crept, whispered and murmured into the collective ear like a prophet of paranoia. Gloriously original, its power to intrigue, disturb and seduce remains undimmed even 30 years after years since its release.

A key contributor to Massive Attack’s groundbreaking Blue Lines (1991) and Protection (1994) albums, here Tricky becomes an alchemist of supreme skill as he blends the ingredients of hip hop, dub, soul, industrial noises, ambient music, post-punk abrasion and a deeply personal standpoint that examines themes of drug use, personal loss and societal decline into a potent potion that’s at once unsettling yet utterly intoxicating. And contributing to its very progginess is an attitude and approach that eschewed the musical mores of the day to move forward into shadowy terrains. Even to this day, few are the records that are as dank and disorientating as Maxinquaye.  

Opener Overcome – a reimaging of his track Karmacoma which had appeared on Massive Attack’s second album – sets the tone for what’s to follow. Singer Martina Topley-Bird – then a teenager and discovered by Tricky when he heard her singing to herself while sat on a garden wall – reinterprets the already bleak lyrics with an even greater sense of lachrymose resignation. Tricky himself is a strange, spectral presence that hovers around and frequently behind Topley-Bird’s voice as he murmers and mutters as if in a world of his own.

Throughout, Maxinquaye feels like a fever dream. Using the same Isaac Hayes sample (Ike’s Rap II) as Portishead’s Glory Box, here the results feel less cinematic and more claustrophobic as Tricky and Topley-Bird circle around each other in a bizarre, heady dance. Similarly, Aftermath evokes humid jungles where even the shade fails to reduce the heat. And yet, for all of its ethereal atmospherics, the album never wallows. Brand New You’re Retro takes a swipe at gang life while Black Steel’s righteous reinvention of hip hop collective Public Enemy’s Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos adds heft to the original while standing on its two feet. 

Defined as much by its vulnerability as it is the sheer scope of innovation of offer, Maxinquaye’s prog credentials may stand to one side of the norm, but they’re bang on target.