Tricky also released his debut solo album Maxinquaye in 1995, to great critical acclaim. The album was produced largely in collaboration with Mark Saunders. Tricky employed whispered, often abstract stream-of-consciousness murmuring, remote from the gangsta-rap braggadocio of the mid-1990s US hip hop scene. Even more unusually, many of the solo songs on Maxinquaye featured little of Tricky's own voice: his then-lover, Martina Topley-Bird, sang them, including her reimagining of Public Enemy's militant 1988 rap "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos", while other songs were male-female duets dealing with sex and love in oblique ways, over beds of sometimes dissonant samples. Within a year Tricky had released two more full-length albums which were considered even more challenging, without finding the same popularity as his Bristol contemporaries Massive Attack and Portishead. Through his brief collaborations with Björk, however, he also exerted influence closer to the pop and alternative rock mainstream, and he developed a large cult fan-base.
