Wild Bunch

Eight Bristol trip-hop essential albums, plus the city's drum and bass. The set is named after the Wild Bunch, the 1980s sound system and crew Massive Attack grew out of, and it is grouped by artist, each in release order.

Massive Attack come first because everything else here connects back to them. Blue Lines set the template in 1991: slow breakbeats, dub bass, soul singers and murmured raps, with Tricky among the voices. Protection, with Tracey Thorn singing the title track, is warmer. Mezzanine turns dark and heavy with guitars, and Elizabeth Fraser sings "Teardrop". Portishead's Geoff Barrow had worked at the studio where Blue Lines was made; Dummy, with Beth Gibbons singing, won the Mercury Prize. Their second album, Portishead, is harsher, and Third, eleven years later, threw out most of what people expected of them. Tricky named Maxinquaye after his late mother, and Martina Topley-Bird sings much of it. Roni Size and Reprazent's New Forms is the city's other sound, drum and bass built with live players, and it won the Mercury too.

The press called the slow records trip-hop, a name the bands mostly did not want.

If you only have time for one, play Blue Lines. It is where the Bristol sound starts, and it still sounds unhurried in a way most of what followed does not.