Portishead

Since 1991 · United Kingdom

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Dummy (1994)

Dummy sounds like a film score for a movie that doesn't exist, built from crackling vinyl samples, jazz-inflected guitar, and Beth Gibbons's aching, vulnerable vocal performances. "Glory Box," built around a sampled Isaac Hayes guitar line, is the album's emotional peak, Gibbons's voice moving from weary resignation to something closer to demand across the song's four minutes. "Sour Times" pairs a tense, cinematic arrangement with one of the record's most immediately memorable vocal hooks. Its combination of hip-hop production technique and torch-song emotional register gave the trip-hop label its clearest and most widely cited musical template.

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Portishead

Dummy · 1994

Portishead formed in Bristol in the early 1990s around Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons, after Barrow had spent time as a studio assistant on Massive Attack's Blue Lines sessions and used the spare studio hours he was given there to start developing his own material. Guitarist Adrian Utley joined soon after, bringing a background in jazz and film-score arranging that shaped the group's noirish, cinematic sound as much as Barrow's sampling did.

Their debut, Dummy, arrived in 1994 and won the UK's Mercury Music Prize the following year. Portishead's self-titled second album followed in 1997, and Third arrived in 2008 after an eleven-year gap, trading the band's earlier hip-hop-indebted sound for something colder and more motorik. Gibbons has since released two records apart from the band -- Out of Season (2002), made with Rustin Man, and Lives Outgrown (2024), written across two decades of grief and ageing -- while Barrow has pursued other projects including his band Beak>. Portishead itself has stayed dormant since Third, each Gibbons solo release received in its absence as the closest thing to new Portishead material.