In the years leading up to the album, Tricky had grown frustrated with his limited role in the musical group Massive Attack and wanted to pursue an independent project.

Tricky recorded Maxinquaye the following year primarily at his home studio in London, with Topley-Bird serving as the album's main vocalist, while Alison Goldfrapp, Ragga and Mark Stewart performed additional vocals.

Its resulting groove-oriented downbeat, hazy and fragmented sound incorporates elements from hip hop, soul, rock, ambient techno, reggae and experimental music.

4th & B'way marketed the album by relying on independent record promoters and Tricky's appearances in media, including publicity photographs and music videos that portrayed him and Topley-Bird in gender-bending fashion.

[1] As part of the collective, he helped arrange sound systems around Bristol's club scene, and performed under a stage name derived from "Tricky Kid", the nickname given to him in a street gang as a youth.

Tricky became a frequent collaborator who rapped over their productions, but quit after finding his role in the group to be limited;[3] he later reworked material he had written for Massive Attack on Maxinquaye.

'"[5] Tricky's lyricism had matured from raps about street violence and sex to more personal and introspective writing, but Topley-Bird described his material for Maxinquaye as "quite depressing", which he believed was because of her more privileged background: "It's just reality.

[11] Ben Walsh of The Independent called it an experimental album featuring a "heady blend" of soul, rock, punk, hip hop, dub and electronica.

[18] According to Greg Kot, his mother's name provided the album its title while her suicide, along with his father abandoning him and Tricky's lack of moral sense as a youth, helped inform his "unsentimental grasp on reality", which was reflected in Maxinquaye's "collision of beauty and violence".

[19] In the opinion of Stylus Magazine's Kenan Hebert, who called it "a document of obsession, mistrust, misconduct, solipsism and sociopathy", the songs dealing with dysfunctional sexual relationships and fear of intimacy were given a Freudian angle by his mother's influence on the album, including Tricky's reference to her on "Aftermath".

[23] Tricky drew on eschatological Rastafarian ideas of end times for the record, although unlike adherents to that movement, he did not disassociate himself from "Babylon" or the decadence of Western society; with lyrics such as "my brain thinks bomb-like/beware of our appetite" on "Hell Is Round the Corner", he said to Reynolds that "I'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution ...

'"[9] Christgau deemed the album's songs "audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check", while O'Hagan said Tricky's "impressionistic prose poems" were written from the deviant perspective of the urban hedonist: "Maxinquaye is the sound of blunted Britain, paranoid and obsessive ...

[24] The songs "Ponderosa", "Strugglin'" and "Hell Is Round the Corner" were inspired by Tricky's experiences with marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and ecstasy, particularly a two-year binge and consequent state of despondency while on Massive Attack's payroll after the completion of Blue Lines.

[25] In Reynolds' opinion, Tricky's experiences with drug-induced paranoia, anxiety and visions of spectres and demons were represented in the production of songs such as "Aftermath", "Hell Is Round the Corner" and "Strugglin'".

[26] On the latter track, he sampled sounds of creaking doors, the click of a gun being loaded, distant sirens and vinyl crackles, with Tricky's lyrics making explicit reference to visions of "mystical shadows, fraught with no meaning".

[23] For "Hell Is Round the Corner", he altered and slowed down a vibrato vocal sample, creating a disorienting effect resembling a basso profondo singer, over a loop of an orchestral Isaac Hayes recording, "Ike's Rap II".

in July, which was a collaboration with the American rap group Gravediggaz and featured "Hell Is Round the Corner"; the song reached number 12 on the British singles chart.

According to 4th & B'way's director Julian Palmer, the UK's demographic of young music buyers such as students was more progressive than in the United States, where he said the record would have to be marketed differently because of his race.

He believed that much like Portishead, a contemporary Bristol act, Tricky would have received airplay in the US on alternative or college rock radio if the label focused their efforts to promote him there: "Some people I've met were confused because he's black, and it's not easy to break through those barriers there.

As The Independent's Phil Johnson recalled, the very thin Tricky was dressed in drag as the bride and his sickly looking face "painted and preened", with smeared lipstick and a false eyelash in the style of Alex from the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.

[30] Reviewing in March 1995 for Mojo, Jon Savage called it a very ambitious and musically audacious work that brilliantly explored the disparities in Britain's social structure, with Topley-Bird as the "dominant voice" articulating Tricky's vision of uncertainty in an ever-changing world.

[42] David Bennun of Melody Maker deemed the album almost perfect and Tricky's music highly "gripping, original, sublime, his lyrics so abstruse and woven into the sound, that they become inseparable".

[47] Maxinquaye's combination of "dreamlike ambient music and hip-hop bite" was praised by the Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn for giving Tricky's "soundscapes about contemporary life such a seductive and provocative edge".

[48] In Q magazine, Tom Doyle credited Topley-Bird's singing for making Maxinquaye "a highly inventive and intoxicating collection" while declaring that "with this debut, Tricky proves himself to be more challenging and eclectic than his peers".

[41] It was also dubbed "the British postmodern album of the 90s" by Jason Draper of Record Collector and "a visionary post-rock statement" by The Philadelphia Inquirer's Tom Moon, while AllMusic's senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it remains "a bracing sonic adventure that gains richness and resonance with each listen" because of the songs' imaginative structures and exceptional use of "noise and experimental music".

[55] In The Village Voice, he wrote that its enduring significance lies in an aesthetic of cool derived from the blues and African-American culture, which valued a self-possessed resolve in the face of oppression: What stands out isn't the dolor pop generalists noticed at the time, but the listenability that induced them to bother: Martina's pervasive lyricism, beats that are buoyant at any speed, a profusion of sweet-tempered [keyboard] effects that signify melody, harmony, strings.

With blues replications per se having worn out their formal gris-gris, it voiced and embraced a grim new resignation about freedom, power, race and human connection in the postwelfare state – and simultaneously counteracted it.

[58] It was ranked high in a Q-published poll determining the 100 greatest British albums, Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" and Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90s", among other lists.