Tricky

From the Wild Bunch to Maxinquaye

Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws was born on January 27, 1968 in Knowle West, Bristol, to a Jamaican father and a Ghanaian-English mother. In the mid-1980s he met DJ Milo and joined the Wild Bunch sound system, which became Massive Attack by 1987, and he rapped on Blue Lines (1991). He met Martina Topley-Bird, who sang on "Aftermath", and Island signed him after a white-label release.

Maxinquaye was recorded in the first half of 1994 at his home studio in Kilburn, then at Loveshack and in Notting Hill, and came out on February 20, 1995 in the UK and April 18 in the US on 4th and B'way. Island supplied an Akai S1000 sampler, an Atari with Logic and an ADAT. Mark Saunders was hired as engineer and ended up as DJ and programmer; Tricky had him sample regardless of tempo or pitch, and Topley-Bird's vocals were mostly one take. It reached 3 in the UK, went gold there and was a 1995 Mercury Prize nominee that lost to Portishead's Dummy. Christgau gave it an A-plus, Jon Pareles of the New York Times called it the first album-length masterpiece of trip hop, and NME, Uncut and Pitchfork all rank it highly.

Later albums include Nearly God and Pre-Millennium Tension (1996), Angels with Dirty Faces (1998), Blowback (2001), Knowle West Boy (2008), Mixed Race (2010), False Idols (2013), Adrian Thaws (2014), Ununiform (2017), Fall to Pieces (2020), When It's Going Wrong (2023) and Out the Way (2025); Different When It's Silent was announced for July 17, 2026 on False Idols. He acted in The Fifth Element (1997), published the autobiography Hell Is Around the Corner (2019) and moved to Berlin in 2015 and later Toulouse. Collaborators include Terry Hall, Bjork, Grace Jones, PJ Harvey and Neneh Cherry. Setlist.fm lists more than a thousand setlists since 1994, including 2026 dates.