Hell Is Around the Corner

The Isaac Hayes sample at the heart of "Hell Is Around the Corner" is one of the most recognizable loops in trip-hop history, which makes it both a gift and a constraint — Tricky had to build a world around it so distinct that the familiarity became strange. He succeeded. The production takes the gorgeous, brooding strings of the Hayes original and encases them in something oppressive, a thick atmospheric pressure that feels like the air before a storm that never quite breaks. Topley-Bird's vocals are barely there, whispering rather than singing, as though projecting too loudly would disturb something. The lyrical content moves through spiritual dread and urban anxiety, never landing on anything as specific as narrative but accumulating the emotional residue of both. The track captures something essential about Bristol in the early nineties — the post-rave comedown, the economic greyness, the way that beauty and violence could coexist in the same street-level frame. It was the track that announced Tricky as something genuinely singular, not just another member of the Massive Attack circle but a distinct artistic intelligence. You listen to it when you want to understand what the mid-nineties British underground felt like at its most atmospheric and uncompromising.