Third is both a departure from and a reminder of that distinctive Portishead sound. Beth Gibbons’s affecting vocals retain the bleak-yet-beautiful feeling of previous Portishead albums but the accompanying noises make for a less-accessible but no-less compelling sound that owes more to the ’80s than any other decade. The band themselves acknowledged this by describing Dummy as having the sound of a crackly vinyl while Third has the wobbly sound of a VHS tape.

Third very much has the feeling of a band wanting to make ‘interesting music’, be it the marching groove of We Carry On, the ukelele sweetness of Deep Water or the piano-crashing of Magic Doors. The incessant, rhythm-driven first single Machine Gun teases us with a minimal mix of industrial percussion and soaring vocals until the final minute of the song when the synths kick in to round out one of the most intriguing comeback singles in recent memory. And the album continues on in this unpredictable manner

Third is a sparse record that sounds at first like it might spiral straight down into the dark but on repeated listens spirals round and round to reveal a collection of gloomy but intrinsically-beautiful songs.