All of Trip Hop guys. Mezzanine by Massive Attack was gold all the way through for example.
Oh man! I'm glad somebody else here likes that stuff. I'm not sure if somebody who wasn't there would realize how groundbreaking it was at the time. Mezzanine got a LOT of play in my house. Aside from all the cool stuff they did combining trippy dub / EDM textures with bits of live drums/bass/guitar, and especially one bassline that is permanently lodged in my head ("Dissolved Girl"
) ... all of that was eclipsed when on Mezzanine they also got some of the best ever vocal performances from Liz Frasier - whose work with Cocteau Twins I always found kind of sonically fascinating, but hard to approach emotionally, a bit too fey, drifting too far into some ethereal world; but on "Teardrop", Massive Attack they got something much more intimate and compelling. What a voice. Gets me every time. Best Massive Attack song for me.
(Frasier's other shining moment in my view is her cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" from This Mortal Coil back in the mid 80s, which I don't even care if it makes me a sad goth emo boy, that song can make me cry.)
And then there was Portishead.
Dummy was the first most of us heard of trip-hop, we didn't even know what the heck to call it, but god damn that was a brilliant record. I've only heard the two 90s releases from Portishead, but both of those are really incredible. I keep forgetting I want to check out the 2008 release as well.