A Few Underrated Trip-Hop Albums You Should Check Out

Good morning!

Today Sam Colt and I are each sharing a few of our favorite trip hop records.

We are so back.

Welcome to the latest installment of our (not so) new series! For those of you who may have missed previous editions, here’s a bit of context:

In this monthly series, Sam Colt and I will each share our picks for artists and/or titles that haven't received their due. You'll recognize Sam's name from our On Repeat and Friends Best of Series, as well as our Top 100 of all-time series last fall. These posts will adopt the latter's format; I will make my case for my three picks and my reaction to Sam's. Sam's page will do the reverse.

In the inaugural post, we noted that successive editions would narrow things down slightly. Maybe a specific genre…maybe a specific era…maybe a specific…well, who knows!

One of the best lines of advice I ever heard about what makes a good podcast, newsletter, whatever is that it’ll “treat your audience like it’s already almost the end of the first quarter.” This was for an American football podcast, and the idea was to assume your audience is highly knowledgeable but not necessarily subject-matter experts. In other words, it assumes listeners already know that touchdowns are worth six points, what a safety is, etc., so you needn’t take time explaining such things. That’s something I’ve always taken to heart and is why you won’t see something like “Webster’s defines trip hop as…” as an opener. At the same time, they might not know the intricacies of a specific play or why it worked or failed. That middle ground is where you kick off from.

Trip hop’s a fun one for me for a couple of reasons. First, as many of you know, I’m a fan of just about anything with a big beat. The more my hearing diminishes, the more my need to (literally) feel the beat grows. So there’s that. It’s also a genre I know my way around, but am still finding new corners to explore and alleys to go down. Lastly, this is a genre where artists both obey and overstep the definitions. The guardrails are already broad — there’s a lot of time zones between, say, Portishead and Tricky — but artists pushing the limits make for a fun ride.

“Dummy” felt like a default option, so it’s