Lamb

Too rugged to be called trip-hop, too tortured for chill-out, Lamb emerged in the mid-’90s with a spellbinding take on electronic music, spinning jungle breaks, jazz double-bass and darkly atmospheric textures into a singularly moody amalgam. The Manchester duo of producer Andy Barlow and vocalist Lou Rhodes got its start in 1996 with singles like “Cottonwool”, drawing energy from the left-field fringe of drum 'n' bass, and released its self-titled debut album that same year. That LP’s “Gorecki”, which paired sorrowful strings (sampled from Polish classical composer Henryk Górecki) with Rhodes’ startlingly vulnerable singing, showed just how emotionally intense their music could be. Lamb moved further into ambient experiments on 1999’s Fear of Fours before pursuing a more melodic direction on 2001’s What Sound; though they briefly disbanded to pursue solo projects in the mid-2000s, they reunited for 2011’s 5 and have remained active since. All the while, they’ve continued to explore new avenues—cinematic tones, melodic balladry, full-band rave-ups—without abandoning the sinewy essence of their sound.