 Tricky eventually grew frustrated with his role in Massive Attack, finding it limiting, and wanted to record an album with a female vocalist whose singing would offer another dimension to his lyrics and their meaning. In 1993, he discovered Martina Topley-Bird, then a teenager at Clifton College, when he saw her sitting against a wall near his house, singing to herself. "That's really how it happened," she recalled. "A few weeks later, I went around to his house with some friends. We'd been drinking cider after our GCSEs. We were banging on his door, but he wasn 't in. Then Mark Stewart, who lived there, came up to us and said:' Yeah, this is Tricky's house, jump in through the window.'" Tricky, whose lyrics had matured from simplistic raps about street violence and sex to more personal and introspective writing, said Topley-Bird found his songs "quite depressing", which he believed was because of her more privileged background: "It's just reality. She's been a student all her life, grew up in Somerset, and I don 't think she's ever faced the real world. She finds it all a bit weird. But she's my best mate." They would form a musical and romantic partnership over subsequent years, and their first recording together, "Aftermath", later appeared on Maxinquaye. After offering the song to Massive Attack, who were not interested in including it on their 1991 album Blue Lines, Tricky released "Aftermath" independently to local record stores in September 1993 before he signed a record deal with 4th & B'way.
