A shadowy figure in the truest sense of the word, Adrian Thaws a.k.a. Tricky has never found the light switch. On Ununiform (2017), the British artist, who has been based in Berlin since 2015, reminded us that he is still one of the most gifted painters of the human soul’s darkness. This master of trip-hop is all too familiar with it. He was orphaned at a very young age, was convicted not much later and his only daughter, Mina Mazy, committed suicide in 2019 at the age of 24. Tricky, now in his fifties, continues to do Tricky. But he doesn’t stop there. On Fall Please, the first single from his 14th album Fall to Pieces, he layers his jet black world on a groove that he says he inherited from go-go music, a subgenre of funk originating from Washington in the seventies. “I’ve managed to do something I’ve never been able to do before. It’s my version of pop music, the closest I’ve got to making pop”. Elsewhere Tricky skilfully blurs the tracks, interrupting a song without warning or following a minimalist and oppressive sequence (Close Now) with a melancholic beat (Thinking Of) or a deceptively playful song (Running Off). As always, female vocals are at the heart of his creations. This time it’s the voice of an unknown Polish woman, Marta Złakowska, who he met during his last European tour and hired on the first night, in Krakow, as a backup singer. “I can tell when someone is humble and down to earth. Martha doesn’t care about being famous, she just wants to sing.” Between pure new wave and haunting trip hop, Fall to Pieces brings together more snippets of songs than truly completed compositions (Hate This Pain, Vietnam). A strange but never unpleasant feeling. Fall to Pieces is another MRI scan of the brain of a complex musician who feeds on his inner suffering. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz