Portishead

By ’97, detractors were starting to damn the entrenched trip-hop scene as a new sort of lounge music — though whether Portishead’s second album was a reaction to that or just a logical progression of their sound is irrelevant in the face of just how devastating it sounds decades removed from that whole debate. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley show flashes of compositional intensity that hew closer to the jazz-mutating griminess of RZA and DJ Premier than any cocktail-bar atmosphere could handle, and Beth Gibbons comes across as so openly vulnerable that she sounds indestructible.