Trip hop

• 1. Introduction

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  Trip hop is a genre born in the council estates of Bristol, England, where DJs who grew up on Jamaican dub music began slowing everything down. The term itself did not exist until June 1994, when a music journalist named Andy Pemberton typed it into a piece for the UK magazine Mixmag. He was describing a single called "In/Flux" by San Francisco producer DJ Shadow, and the word he chose captured something specific: the sensation, as Pemberton put it, that the listener was on a musical trip. What followed was one of the most distinctive sounds to emerge from any British city in the twentieth century. How did a loose gathering of DJs, graffiti artists, and MCs in one English city create a genre that would eventually shape the work of artists from Iceland to Australia? And why did some of its defining architects refuse the label almost as soon as it stuck?

• 2. The Wild Bunch

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  DJ Milo, whose full name is Milo Johnson and who also records as DJ Nature, is generally accepted as the creator of the Bristol sound and, by extension, trip hop itself. He was a founding member of the Wild Bunch crew, Bristol's most consequential soundsystem. Like the Bronx crews built around DJs Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash, the Wild Bunch provided party music for public spaces, often in the economically deprived council estates where some of its members grew up. Bristol's DJs drew heavily on Jamaican dub music, favouring a laid-back, slow, and heavy drum beat known as "down tempo".

  The Wild Bunch's membership reads like a founding document of British electronic music. At various points it included MC Adrian "Tricky Kid" Thaws, graffiti artist and lyricist Robert "3D" Del Naja, producer Jonny Dollar, and the DJs Nellee Hooper, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles, and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. As the hip-hop scene in Bristol matured and musical trends shifted toward acid jazz and house in the late 1980s, the Wild Bunch signed a record deal. The core collective of 3D, Mushroom, and Daddy G evolved into Massive Attack, with significant contributions from Tricky Kid (soon shortened to Tricky), Dollar, and Hooper on production duties.

  A separate but parallel influence came from Gary Clail's Tackhead soundsystem, which often worked with former The Pop Group singer Mark Stewart. Stewart experimented with his band Mark Stewart and the Maffia, whose lineup included New York session musicians Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish, and Keith LeBlanc. LeBlanc had been part of the house band for Sugarhill Records. Produced by Adrian Sherwood, their music combined hip-hop with experimental rock and dub in a way that sounded, in retrospect, like a primitive version of what trip hop would become.

• 3. Blue Lines and the Name

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  Massive Attack's first album, Blue Lines, was released in 1991 to substantial success in the United Kingdom. Critics and listeners saw it widely as the first major example of a distinctly British hip-hop movement, though the album's hit single "Unfinished Sympathy" resisted easy categorisation. Co-produced by Jonny Dollar, "Unfinished Sympathy" featured R&B singer Shara Nelson, while Jamaican dance hall artist Horace Andy provided vocals on several other tracks, a collaboration that would continue across Massive Attack's career. Their second album, Protection, followed in 1994.

  It was in June 1994, with Protection freshly released, that Andy Pemberton's Mixmag piece formally christened the genre. Pemberton was describing "In/Flux", a 1993 single by DJ Shadow and the UK act RPM, the latter signed to Mo' Wax Records. "In/Flux" mixed up beats per minute, wove in spoken word samples, strings, melodies, and what Pemberton described as bizarre noises, all over a prominent bass and slow beats. Journalists soon began applying the same label to Massive Attack's dubby, jazzy, psychedelic, electronic textures, treating their sound as the genre's template.

  In Kirsty MacColl's 1993 release "Angel", listeners heard one of the first examples of the genre crossing over into pop, a hybrid that would come to dominate charts toward the end of the decade.

• 4. Portishead, Tricky, and the Bristol Peak

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  Portishead were a trio: singer Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley. Where Massive Attack drew primarily from dub and hip-hop, Portishead's primary influence was film soundtrack LPs from the 1960s and 1970s. Barrow had briefly worked with Massive Attack during the recording of Blue Lines, and the two acts shared a scratchy, jazz-sample-based sound. In 1994, Portishead released their debut album Dummy. The following year, Dummy was awarded the Mercury Music Prize as the best British album of the year, giving trip hop its widest audience yet.

  That prize came with a complication. Portishead's music was imitated so widely and so quickly that Barrow felt compelled to distance the band from the very label the prize had amplified. "The whole trip-hop tag was nonsense," he said. "It was developed by people in London, and the people in Bristol just had to put up with it."

  Also in 1995, Tricky released his debut solo album Maxinquaye, produced largely in collaboration with Mark Saunders. Tricky's lyrical style was built on whispered, often abstract stream-of-consciousness lines, a world away from the gangsta-rap braggadocio then dominating the US hip-hop scene. Many of the solo songs on Maxinquaye featured the voice of his then-lover, Martina Topley-Bird, who sang them in full, including her re-imagining of Public Enemy's 1988 song "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos". Other tracks were male-female duets dealing with sex and love obliquely, over dissonant samples. Within a year, Tricky had released two more full-length albums, though neither matched the impact of Maxinquaye.

• 5. Björk and the Pop Crossing

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  In 1993, Icelandic musician Björk released Debut, produced by Wild Bunch member Nellee Hooper. The album was rooted in four-on-the-floor house music but carried elements of trip hop. It is credited as one of the first albums to bring electronic dance music into mainstream pop. Björk had been in contact with London's underground electronic music scene and was, at the time, romantically involved with Tricky.

  She went further with her 1995 album Post, collaborating directly with Tricky and producer Howie B. Her 1997 album Homogenic has since been described as a pinnacle of trip hop music. The arc of her three albums across those years traces the genre's own trajectory from underground experiment to something capable of holding the centre of mainstream pop.

  The independent record label Ninja Tune, founded by the duo Coldcut, also shaped how the genre spread beyond Bristol and beyond the United Kingdom. Ninja Tune brought through artists including DJ Food, 9 Lazy 9, Up Bustle and Out, Funki Porcini, and The Herbaliser, extending trip hop's reach into London and further. By 1994 and 1995, trip hop had reached something close to its commercial peak, with artists such as Howie B and Earthling adding to the genre's density.

• 6. Sound and Influence

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  Trip hop tracks built their atmospheres from a specific palette: Rhodes pianos, saxophones, trumpets, flutes, and occasionally unconventional instruments such as the theremin and the Mellotron. The genre separated itself from hip-hop not just sonically but thematically, offering what the source describes as aural atmospherics influenced by experimental folk and rock acts of the 1970s such as John Martyn, combined with turntable scratching and breakbeat rhythms. Tricky's 1996 album Nearly God opened with a cover of "Tattoo", a 1983 song by Siouxsie and the Banshees originally released as a b-side. Massive Attack covered and sampled songs by both Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure in 1997 and 1998 respectively, tracing a direct line from post-punk's melancholy to trip hop's.

  The genre's vocabulary of influences eventually spread outward to a wide range of other artists. Gorillaz, Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey, The xx, Radiohead, and Deftones all absorbed elements of trip hop into their own work. Several tracks on Kylie Minogue's 1997 album Impossible Princess carried a trip hop influence. The first printed use of the phrase "post-trip hop" appeared in an October 2002 article in The Independent, applied to a band called Second Person. That label's emergence marked the point at which the genre had been established long enough to have its own aftermath.

  Daniel Nakamura, recording as Dan the Automator, released his 2000 concept album Deltron 3030 with Del the Funky Homosapien portraying a rapper from the future. His 2001 side project Lovage brought in special guests including Mike Patton, Prince Paul, Maseo, Damon Albarn, and Afrika Bambaataa. Both records owed a heavy debt to trip hop even as they reached toward something new.

• 7. After the Peak

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  Lana Del Rey's 2012 album Born to Die contained a string of trip hop ballads and topped the charts in eleven countries, including Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, it had sold 3.4 million copies worldwide as of 2013. The album's commercial reach demonstrated how far the genre's sensibility had travelled from Bristol's council estates.

  Massive Attack returned in 2010 with Heligoland, their first studio album in seven years. That same year, DJ Shadow's The Less You Know, the Better was previewed at a performance in Antwerp in August 2010 and aired on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show before its full release in 2011. Sam Richards, writing for NME, felt the album sounded "like the work of a man struggling to recall his motivations for making music in the first place."

  In September 2021, the Sneaker Pimps released Squaring the Circle, their first release in over twenty years, featuring Simonne Jones on some of the tracks. The album remained rooted in trip hop while taking on more of a pop styling than the band's earlier work. In April 2024, Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. released "Starburster", the lead single from their fourth album Romance, with critics describing it as trip hop. In the mid-2020s, FKA Twigs, whose music had been described in a Pitchfork Magazine article as "trip hop for a new time" following the 2013 release of EP2, released her third studio album Eusexua, continuing a line of influence that stretched back to Andy Pemberton's coinage in a magazine more than three decades earlier.