Portishead - Dummy

Dummy is the debut studio album by English electronic band Portishead, released on 22 August 1994 by Go! Beat Records. The album received critical acclaim and won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. It is often credited with popularizing the trip hop genre, and is frequently cited in lists of the best albums of the 1990s. Dummy had sold 825,000 copies in the United Kingdom as of September 2011 and was certified triple platinum in the UK in February 2019, for sales of 900,000 copies. Worldwide, the album had sold 3.6 million copies by 2008.

The classic debut Portishead album from 1994. The collaboration of studio whiz Geoff Barrow and singer Beth Gibbons, Dummy was made at the same time as a short film noir called To Kill a Dead Man, and the same approach - gloomy, tormented, and wildly melodramatic - permeates the album.

"Sour Times" (the hit in which Gibbons cries, again and again, "nobody loves me, it's true") and the more cryptic "Glory Box" are the lynchpins of the album, defining its sound: dark flashes of old soul and film music, dehumanised electronic bleeps, Gibbons emoting like she's consumed by shame, and a bass-and-beat pulse derived from the slow bump and grind of the Bristol scene that spawned Barrow's old collaborators.