The music media labels many artists as geniuses, progenitors, trailblazers, while only a handful are really deserving any of these or similar epithets. Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, aka Tricky is one of those artists. He would have deserved one (or all) of those if he had only released Maxinquaye, his debut album from some 30 years or so ago. Yet he’s kept reconfirming that status through quite a few of 15 albums he released under his own name and countless aliases and collaborations that he’s kept on pouring out through the years.
It has been some six years since Tricky issued an album his own name/alias with 2020’s Fall to Pieces, possibly due to the fact that he lost his daughter back in 2019. However, he has worked during the intervening years under various aliases and in collaborations, the last being some work with Polish vocalist Marta Złakowska on her 2025 album Out the Way.
At the same time, and through the decades, Tricky has been riddled with some serious health issues that often manifested through idiosyncratic live appearances and refusal to talk to the press of any kind.
Now, Tricky is back with Different When It’s Silent, and a series of in-depth interviews – something that was previously a rarity. Yet, the key question here revolves about the album’s substance and whether Tricky still deserves that trailblazing status he’s earned through his work so far.
First of all, to discern what is going on here you wold need to take a look and listen to find out what remains as a continuous line in Tricky’s work and what is new to his style that he introduces here.
There were always elements of both conscious and subconscious present in Tricky’s work. On the subconscious side, he pours it all out and lets his instincts be the guiding force. On the conscious front, he is like a master puppeteer, often giving a chance to other vocalists to present his main ideas. And it seems he’s always had a great sense who those vocalists should be. On this album it is mainly singer-songwriter Mitch Sanders along with Marta, Run Red Rambo and Radana.
Whether or not he’s continuing to be a boundary pusher shouldn’t matter, because he remains among those artists that a mass of other artists have been following to this day. But on evidence of 14 songs here, intentionally or instinctively, he does care and keeps pushing the boundaries.
That pushing might not be in leaps and bounds that came with his earliest solo work, but is still there and in audible increments. As he points in one of his fresh interviews with Brooklyn Vegan, “I’ve always messed around with rock, but [this is] my first indie rock album.” And if you wonder if that is true and if it works, you can get confirmations in tracks like “Cannon Fodder” and “Frontier Town”.
Yet there is also the fact that he has found a real balance between electronics and acoustic instruments (“Piano,” “Because I Don’t Know”), or simply open spaces and near silence (“Hengrove Blues”).
The closer “Out of Place” turns out to be a sort of a summary of all of the above, and like the rest of the album confirms that Tricky not only still matters, but has something substantial to say musically.
