Album Of The Week: Tricky – Fall To Pieces

Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days is Fall To Pieces, the latest from Tricky – revisit the album and have a listen via Spotify.

“For whatever reason we’re in a new era, where the people we used to once recognise as untouchable (after all, we did call them stars) are three steps less removed, somehow in our hands. Not everybody treats fame like this, but Tricky has experienced anguish like few people have had to deal with, and he continues to face it down on his own terms.”

“It’s been twenty-five years since Maxinquaye redrew British music’s lay lines, driving a wedge into the dominance of American artists in hip-hop and beyond which would eventually become a fissure. Since then, he’s led a life he could barely have imagined when growing up on Bristol’s Knowle West estate, a story vividly chronicled in his 2019 autobiography Hell Is Around The Corner.”

“The book ends in a moment of acute devastation with the death of his twenty-four-year-old daughter Mazy; Fall To Pieces is his first album since the tragedy, and one on which he addresses grief but also the racism his good career fortune has both highlighted and shielded him from.”

Click here for the full review