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AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	A−
Los Angeles Times
NME	9/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Select	4/5

Dummy is the debut album by English band Portishead, released in the UK on 22 August 1994 on Go! Beat.

The album received critical acclaim, winning the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. It is often credited with popularising the trip hop genre and is frequently cited in lists of the best albums of the 1990s. Although it achieved only modest chart success overseas, it peaked at number 2 on the UK Album Chart and saw two of its three singles reach number 13. The album was certified gold in 1997 and has sold two million copies in Europe. The album was certified double platinum in the UK in 1996, for sales exceeding 600,000 copies. It had sold 825,000 copies in the United Kingdom as of September 2011.

Building on the promise of their earlier EP, 'Numb', Dummy helped to cement the reputation of Bristol as the capital of trip hop, a nascent genre which was then often referred to simply as "the Bristol sound". The cover is a still image of vocalist Beth Gibbons taken from To Kill a Dead Man—the short film that the band created—for which the self-composed soundtrack earned the band its record contract.

The album spawned two singles in addition to the already released "Numb": "Glory Box", which reached No. 13 in the UK singles chart; and "Sour Times", which reached the same position on re-release in 1995. "Sour Times" achieved moderate success in the US, reaching peak positions of No. 5 and No. 53 on the Alternative and Hot 100 Billboard charts, respectively, in February 1995. On 3 December 2008, Universal Music Japan released Dummy and Portishead as limited SHM-CD versions.

For the track "Sour Times", the album samples Lalo Schifrin's "The Danube Incident" and Smokey Brooks' (Henry Brooks, Otis Turner) "Spin It Jig"; for "Strangers", Weather Report's (Wayne Shorter) "Elegant People"; for "Wandering Star", War's "Magic Mountain"; for "Biscuit", Johnnie Ray's "I'll Never Fall in Love Again"; and for "Glory Box", Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II".

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