Trip hop is a downtempo style that emerged in Bristol, England, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It pairs slow, heavy hip hop breakbeats with dub bass, samples from soul, jazz, funk and film soundtracks, and dark, cinematic atmospheres, often topped by a female vocalist. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines (1991), Portishead’s Dummy (1994), which won the Mercury Prize, and Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995) are its classic records.
The name was coined by the journalist Andy Pemberton in the June 1994 issue of the dance magazine Mixmag, to describe a track by DJ Shadow, and many of the artists it was later applied to disliked it. London labels such as Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune championed the instrumental side of the sound. Trip hop’s smoky, sample-based melancholy is one of the clearest ancestors of lo-fi, which kept its slow tempos and vinyl-rich textures while leaving much of its darkness behind.