In 2019, Tricky’s daughter died suddenly. “To be honest with you, since my daughter died, I want to work,” he says now. The album that followed her death, Fall to Pieces, was raw enough that six years passed before he made a full record under his own name again. Different When It’s Silent picks up that thread, though you might not notice straightaway: Tricky is barely audible on his own comeback record.
He didn’t originally set out to make one. The songs came together quietly between his home in France and a studio in Bristol, and Tricky assumed they’d end up as another side project, like the string of collaborations that filled the six years in between: Lonely Guest, which included one of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s final recorded appearances; Fifteen Days with producer Mike Theis; Out The Way with Marta Zลakowska. It was his manager, Alan McGee, who heard the demos and told him otherwise.
The result still isn’t really a solo album in the way that phrase usually implies. Bristol singer Mitch Sanders appears on nearly every track, his falsetto closer to Beth Gibbons than anything Tricky has ever sung himself, and it’s Sanders who ends up carrying most of the record’s actual melody. Tricky sits underneath as more of a pressure than a voice, which is exactly the criticism several reviewers have made of his first true solo comeback in six years: it’s hard to find much of him on it.
Opener ‘I Still See Me There’ is the clearest example. Sanders carries the melody almost entirely alone, Tricky reduced to a low, rasping commentary running underneath. It’s one of the most striking things on the record, and also the moment that proves the criticism has a point, even if the mood it creates, two people mourning the same thing from separate rooms, is exactly what the song needs.
Elsewhere the album stretches further than expected. ‘Frontier Town’, one of only two songs without Sanders, leans into a country lilt Tricky has called his first real go at an indie rock song, with Christian Pattemore and Youth’s Martin Glover filling the space Sanders usually would. ‘Be Still In The Pain’ does the opposite, all buzzing low-end bass and a hard verse from Run Red Rambo, a rare jolt of aggression on a record that mostly sits low.
By ‘Hengrove Blues’, named for the Bristol neighbourhood, the record has stripped down to almost nothing: long stretches of open space where the silence in the title finally means what it says. This is the clearest evidence yet that Tricky vanishing into the mix is the whole method.
If you came here for Tricky as a commanding presence, this record won’t give it to you. If you came for a man who has spent thirty years turning absence into a kind of voice, Different When It’s Silent might be the purest version of that instinct he’s made since Maxinquaye.
