Different When It's Silent

"Make me want to die."Rolling over the plodding bass guitar dirge that opens Tricky's 15th studio album like fog off a pond, the first line on Different When It's Silent belongs to a new boy from Bristol — or rather, it's voiced by one.As his stage name suggests, authorship has always been deeply muddied in Tricky's world. Since his solo debut on 1995's Maxinquaye, Adrian Thaws has routinely relinquished the microphone's spotlight, preferring instead to diffuse his influence through a cast of collaborators. Different When It's Silent deepens that tradition. More ghostlike than ever before, Thaws barely exhales his echoed accompaniment to the opening track in a single gasping breath while young singer-songwriter Mitch Sanders pours an eerie falsetto into the foreground, making the spell his own.And why not? For Thaws, this lyrical fragment isn't saying anything new, but for fans, it's loaded with historical baggage. Reaching back to Pre-Millennium Tension, where his then-wife and creative partner Martina Topley-Bird imbued "Makes Me Wanna Die" with a still, stoned reflection, "I Still See Me There" revisits the refrain as memory, as exquisite corpse begging for exorcism, Tricky's spoken rasp haunting the background before the mist lifts and the elder Bristolian comes into focus: "You're everywhere / Don't leave me here."Tricky has always met the past that follows him by erasing his presence, placing faith in the mathematical logic that duelling negations could cancel each other out and mutually amplify what's left in the wake. But while Thaws has routinely dispossessed himself through possessing other voices, up until this point he has overwhelmingly chosen women as surrogates for his haunted emotions, a preference he's attributed to an attempt to channel his late mother, who died by suicide when he was four years old."I'm her vehicle," he told the late Mark Fisher in a 2008 interview for The Wire. "So I need a woman to sing that."Quietly overturning that arrangement — apart from a single appearance from longtime collaborator Marta Złakowska — Sanders assumes the lead on this album, and in a press release, Thaws confirms that the (re)inverted gender dynamic was deliberate."There's only one female vocal on this, Marta," Thaws said. "So that's deliberate for a man singing 'make me want to die.' It just changes things."The spectres haunting these songs include a lost relationship, lost youth and the loss of a former self. The first album under the Tricky moniker in six years, it also arrives in the aftermath of Thaws's daughter Mazy Mina's suicide in 2019. If the women who dominated Tricky's earlier work gave voice to the mother he spent decades remembering, raised in a working class neighbourhood adjacent to Tricky's Knowle West council estate upbringing, Sanders's falsetto feels like a stand-in for the boy she left behind, and it lends itself to a new uncanny resonance."I'm Yours" and its repeated declaration of, "I'm yours / You're mine," feels less like the stuff of a love song than a dance of mutual dispossession. "Because I Don't Know" borrows Blade Runner's "Tears in the rain" monologue in a callback to Maxinquaye's "Aftermath" and its sampling of the film's replicant interrogations.On "Cannon Fodder," Sanders pinches Springsteen's delivery on "Dancing in the Dark" while Tricky wavers in the background, echoing select words from a distance: "You keep me crying / You keep me crying all the time." Anchored by the nervous perpetual seesaw of an electric organ trading the same two chords with a looping shaker and pulse, the song itself is brushed with a bleak and restless lo-fi minimalism, as if communing with a fugitive timeline where the Boss discovered Suicide while recording Born in the USA instead of Nebraska.Tricky's collaboration with Złakowska, "Out of Place," reconnects with the emotional grammar of his greatest records while acknowledging the passing of his daughter directly. Their voices orbiting one another rather than occupying separate worlds, its throbbing rhythm recalls the parabolic thrust of Maxinquaye's reimagining of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," and it's one of the few moments where memory feels less like it's the place of possession than reconciliation.It's fitting that the album's most affecting moment is also the one that most clearly remembers where Tricky came from and seemingly restores him, but whether the record earns the catharsis is another question. More epilogue than finale, it's an abrupt shift from the world Sanders and Tricky patiently spent the previous tracks constructing, so it feels less like a resolution than a glimpse of one — and Different When It's Silent ends before explaining how it got there.But perhaps that's the point. Tricky has spent three decades dissolving himself into other people's voices, using absence as a way of speaking for him. It's encouraging to think that, in Sanders, he's found another channel through which he can show up for himself.