A Trip Through Trip-Hop's Past and Future

New York Times

5 hours ago

By David Renard
Dear listeners,
Over the past couple of years, it's started to feel like every out-of-favor electronic music style from the 1990s is returning at once. PinkPantheress is singing pop songs over drum-and-bass beats. Oklou uses trance synths. Hyperpop has made 'uncool' taste a creative virtue. (On the less-out-of-favor, more-commercially-successful end of things, there's Beyoncé and Charli XCX's love for 'Show Me Love.')
Signs have been building that trip-hop, a genre that reached popularity in the mid-90s by mixing atmospheric hip-hop beats with moody pop vocals, was next up for a resurgence. In one sense, it's a sound that never fully went away — step into any swanky hotel bar over the past few decades — but it was seen as a creative dead end. 'Today, trip-hop is the most toothless of beats-based styles,' the critic Jody Rosen wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Times about Massive Attack, one of the genre's standard-bearers. 'It's easy listening for hipsters in space-age sneakers.'
Well, lace up my space-age sneakers, because this music is sounding good again. Confirmation that I wasn't imagining things hit my inbox via a recent edition of the always perceptive Herb Sundays music newsletter, which found ample evidence that trip-hop is in the zeitgeist, like Logic1000's new, low-B.P.M. mix for the long-running DJ-Kicks series. (They referred to the sound as 'downtempo,' one of a few related labels, but let's not get lost in the subgenre soup and just vibe, OK?)
Here are six classics from trip-hop's initial wave and four tracks from current artists who are picking up the torch.
A woman in the moon is singing to the earth,
Dave
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