When Tricky made his solo debut in 1995 with Maxinquaye, few people would have bet that this pained, perverse, and cantankerous figure would still be active three decades on. And yet 31 years later it is Tricky, of all the Bristol crew, who has kept the music coming: While Portishead fell silent after 2008’s Third and Massive Attack haven’t released a new album in 16 years, Different When It’s Silent is Tricky’s 15th longplayer, give or take: a record of pointed modern blues that suggests an artist still driven to create.
The new album differs significantly from 2020’s Fall to Pieces, Tricky’s last album under his own name. He has a new vocal partner in the form of Bristol singer Mitch Sanders, whose delicate and alarmingly pure falsetto on songs like “Hengrove Blues” and “Cannon Fodder” offers a distinct counterpoint to Marta Złakowska’s Martina Topley-Bird-esque whisper (although Złakowska does appear on one song, album closer “Out of Place”). Fall to Pieces’ electronic-tinged production, meanwhile, has given way to a palette dominated by live drums and electric guitars, particularly in the first half of the record.
At times—notably on “Paris Maybe”—the combination makes it feel like Tricky has basically made a modern post-punk album, like the Cure fronted by Matt Bellamy, with the spectral remnant of Tricky’s vocal rasp the only real suggestion that anything slightly odder is afoot. Massive Attack, Tricky’s alma mater, once trod similar ground, and several songs here bring to mind their own twisted rock opus Mezzanine, for better or worse. “Out of Place,” with its thundering mixture of distorted guitars, throbbing synth, opulent string line, and undercurrent of rage, is one of Tricky’s best songs in years, while “Because I Don’t Know” is more like a low-watt “Angel” looking for a spark.
On the whole, this is the side of Different When It’s Silent that holds up best. The second half of the record is dominated by awkward experiments; Tricky is still going to Tricky, after all. And for all the inspired touches—Samantha Rowe’s operatic vocals on “Piano” or pairing Dwaine Browne’s rough-as-cat’s-tongue vocal with violin and cello on “Radana”—the hokey stomp of “Frontier Town” and acoustic whimsy of “Hengrove Blues” feel misplaced. What’s more, for all Tricky’s composure, you wish at times for more of his own phlegm-flecked growl to balance out Sanders’ slick performance. When Tricky does finally give free rein to his furious and full-bodied vocal on “Out of Place,” his performance gives the album real venom.
In terms of production and mood, Different When It’s Silent feels like a strong idea gone slightly to seed. At least it has an idea, though. Tricky’s confused and disparate mid-period records often lacked any sense of purpose or ambition—on 2014’s Adrian Thaws, for example, Tricky felt like a man in search of a muse.
Behind this slightly wandering album lies the deep focus of tragedy. Tricky’s daughter Mazy died in 2019; since then, the artist has said that he wants to work. Mazy’s presence, he recently explained, is “is all over” Different When It’s Silent. You can feel the terrible grief of a parent on songs like the brooding, burning “I’m Yours” and “I Still See Me There,” a 7/8 crawl through a desert of pure sadness that opens with the line “make me want to die” (a familiar line from the Tricky songbook) and only gets more desolate. And if there’s nothing quite as strong as Fall to Pieces’ devastating “Hate This Pain,” then “Be Still in the Pain,” a tortured street-soul torch song that is all the more desperate for its incongruously upbeat drums, comes pretty close.
At its best, Different When It’s Silent is urgent, visceral, and robust, an act of catharsis that Tricky had to make. Perhaps inevitably, the record isn’t as vital to the listener as it feels like it is to Tricky—and probably never could be—but after the darkly desperate Fall to Pieces, Tricky’s punchy, punky album is further evidence of a career renaissance rooted in emotional power and musical exorcism.
