Portishead

Few records from the 1990s sound as unhurried as Portishead, and the Bristol trio built that stillness into something distinctive. Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley make music that borrows the hush of spy-film soundtracks and lays it over hip-hop loops, with Gibbons's voice carrying the sense of longing. Formed in 1991 after Barrow and Gibbons met on an Enterprise Allowance course in the city, the group took its name from a dreary home town a few miles west of Bristol. The band disliked the trip-hop tag that came to be attached to its work.

Dummy, released in 1994, won the Mercury Music Prize the following year and was ranked 131st on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, with singles "Numb", "Sour Times" and "Glory Box". A self-titled second album followed in 1997, leaning more on live instrumentation, and a live recording from a one-off show with strings at the Roseland Ballroom in New York appeared in 1998. After years largely away from the spotlight, they returned with Third in 2008, premiering new songs at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Minehead before its release.