2008. Great Britain. A new album. By Portishead? Trip-hop. And hop on the trip. Only that this trip is already quite dark. A long-awaited return and a magnificent album. No, don’t think the music is absolutely different. The hypnotic audio minimalism is at hand. But the total mood in “Third” is with few ideas more oppressive and darker. Born of electronic noises, breathing instruments, melancholy and scary emptiness. Darkness and timelessness. Industrial dusk and trapped in cage tenderness. “Silence” is a suitable beginning. Sadness, loneliness and “silence” wrap the mind. It starts the engrossed walk in the “third”. Sampled audio-pictures, minor tones, sung resigned despair. “Hunter” is an exhausted slow hypnosis. “Nylon Smile”, “Plastic” - artificial matters correlated to the organism of the art. Parallel with them there sound programmed instruments, piercing the silence and the “living” voice of Beth Gibbons. Voice that joins the acoustic guitar in a poetic timid duet in “Deep Water”. Or shares distorted and pressed in “We Cary On”. Arrhythmic pulse in “Magic Doors” on which lies beautiful and tragic the melodic line of the vocals and the velvet chords of the piano. “Threads” plunges even more in the melody as like in the noise. Geoff Barrow brings in the musical destruction, Adrian Utley leads the melody, and Beth sings the suffering. Until there remain the last pulsations before the hopeless silence. The town of Desperation is dead and buried. More than ten years of waiting for this third trip. And hop - an amazing result. I would wait for ten years more if this is the condition for such a strong album.