Portishead - Dummy

Portishead's Dummy landed in 1994 sounding like a spy film left out in the rain, and it is still the record most people mean when they say trip-hop.

Working out of Bristol, Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley pieced the album together from crackling samples and slow, heavy breakbeats, then gave Gibbons room to sing as if every line cost her something. It won the 1995 Mercury Prize and turned a small studio project into one of the defining British albums of the decade, a blueprint that countless producers have borrowed from ever since.

The craft is in the restraint. "Mysterons" opens with an eerie, wavering melody over a beat that drags its feet on purpose, and "Sour Times" stalks along on a twangy, cinematic guitar figure and a lovelorn refrain. "Roads" is the hush at the centre, strings swelling behind a vocal so fragile it barely holds together. Then "Glory Box" closes on a smoky, slow-motion groove and one of the great vocal performances of the nineties.

Every hiss and scratch feels intentional, the work of people who loved old records and wanted theirs to sound haunted by them.

On vinyl, that dusty glow is right at home, as if the album has finally found its way back to the format that inspired it.