Hood, led by guitarist Richard Adams and his brother Chris, were immediately compared to Flying Saucer Attack, but their first singles (Sirens, Opening Into Enclosure, White Bread) also absorbed American college pop (Guided By Voices, Sebadoh) and the amateur pop of New Zealand (Clean, Tall Dwarfs ). Those early recordings were later collected on Structured Disasters (Happy Go Lucky, 1997).

The album Cabled Linear Traction (Fluff, 1994 � Slumberland, 1995), with the lineup stabilized as a quintet, is a kaleidoscope of irregular harmonies, of oblique songs that make the most Babel-like confusion their modus operandi.
They were among the very few in Britain in 1995 to propose something new, yet their debut album was pressed in only two hundred copies... It was nevertheless quickly rediscovered all over the world, from New Zealand to the USA, becoming for many the �case� of the year.

Four singles (Lee Faust Million Piece Orchestra, A Harbor Of Thoughts, I've Forgotten How T Live, Secrets Now Know) occupy most of 1996. Little space is left for the 26 tracks of Silent '88 (Slumberland, 1996), a far less engaging copy of the debut album, but equally violent and better produced.

Structured Disasters (Happy Go Lucky, 1997) collects the singles from 1992 till 1996.

The six lengthy pieces of Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys (Domino, 1998), six tender poems that scour the soul for flickers of emotion, revealed a completely different band, one that was introverted and almost mystical in its approach to music. S.E. Rain Patterns, whose jangling lament emerges from four minutes of distant droning, straddles the "slo-core" border between the Red House Painters and Talk Talk, while The Light Reveals The Place, whose suave melody is caressed by a tenuous clarinet and pierced by a distorted guitar, updates My Bloody Valentine's shoegazing rock to the Necks' infinite jamming. The 13-minute Diesel Pioneers is the transcendental zenith of the album, at least from the initial cosmic "om" to the hymn-like chant, before an inept hard-rock jamming destroys all the magic. Matt Elliot of the Third Eye Foundation guests and does little that is immediately visible but may have been an inspiration. Many of the ideas were intriguing, but the implementation was amateurish at best.

More singles followed: The Year Of Occasional Lull (Rocket Racer, 1998), The Weight (555, 1998) and Filmed Initiative (Happy Go Lucky, 1998).

When an album finally surfaced, The Cycle Of Days And Season (Domino, 1999), it was a disappointing follow-up to Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys. It seemed that, whenever Hood came up with a good idea, they couldn't resist wasting it in a needless and inferior repetition.

The mini-album Home Is Where It Hurts (aesthetics, 2000) fared much better. Home Is Where It Hurts is a jewel of mixing acoustic guitar and samples of instruments and vocals and the result is remiscent of the new wave. Cold Fire Woods of Western Lanes is also a simple tune, but set on fire by loud instruments. The Fact That You Failed toys with dub and industrial noise. If these tracks represent the "light" side of Hood's art, the other two are the real thing. Drum machines shake The World Touches Too Hard from the hypnosis of drones of strings, horns and guitar reverbs. It's Been A Long Time Since I was Last Here is a veritable melodrama, orchestrated in a complex and effective manner.

Hood achieved their masterpiece with Cold House (Aesthetics, 2001), thanks to a sophisticated mixture of three carefully-dosed elements. First, it's the melodies: plaintive, romantic, tender, melancholy. Second, the acoustic instruments: trumpet, cello, piano, violin, sax. Third (and foremost), the layers of cutting-edge electronica, digital clicks and fractured beats. If that melodic style had already been premiered on Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys, and if the instrumental tapestry had been already tested on Home Is Where It Hurts, the electronic/digital element was a new layer added to their ever more intricate art. The more visible result were lukewarm and melancholy bedroom-oriented pop songs such as the jangling You Show No Emotion At All and the dreamy This Is What We Do To Sell Out(s) that were undermined by a fragile polyphony of tentative guitar sounds, skipping beats, brittle sound effects, shy vocals. But, at a subtler level, the album was an unlikely hybrid of ambient pop and glitch music, of latter-day Talk Talk and Autechre, of trip-hop and Robert Wyatt.
The more avantgarde songs seemed to reach for another dimension, like the psychedelic bands of the 1960s at the peak of the transcendental vogue: the celestial strumming and acid vocals of The River Curls Around the Town, the abstract, dilated chant with dub-like percussion of The Winter Hit Hard the detached chamber music of They Removed All Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here and the most Wyatt-ian piece, You're Worth The Whole World (virtually a leftover of End Of An Ear).
Even the simpler tunes, such as Lines Low To Frozen Ground and With Branches Bare (reminiscent of Depeche Mode's Enjoy The Silence), sounded extra-terrestrial after the Hood treatment.
With this album Hood reinvented themselves one more time, this time as a digital dance-folk project.

After the EP You Show No Emotion At All (Domino, 2002),

Compilations 1995-2002 (Misplaced Music) and Singles Compiled (Misplaced Music) are anthologies.

The EP The Lost You (Domino, 2005) hinted at a revolution in sound, towards a less cerebral and more bodily music.

Instead Outside Closer (Domino, 2005) replicated the same autumnal, frigid and vaguely transcendental post-rock that had become their trademark. As the only band around that could conceive pastoral dissonance and melancholy exuberance as perfectly rational concepts, they succeeded on both fronts. Generally speaking, the songs were more lively and robust (mainly because the rhythmic apparatus dispensed with glitch attitudes and provided a true backbone), although they retained the ethereal vocals. The catchy The Negatives was a singalong by their standards, The flowing, organic Still Rain Fell flirted with the composure of pop music. Winter 72, that returned to the dilated vocals, showed the difference that the drums could make compared with the glitchy beats of Cold House (for better and for worse).
The construction of the seven-minute Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive was sophisticated, but it ultimately amounted to a melodic and harmonic crescendo. The seven-minute Closure wed progressive structures a` la This Heat with the dejected mood of Everything But The Girl and the austere charm of chamber pop, thus bridging three worlds.
Hood were still experimented wildly with the song format, notably indulging in the self-assembling mechanisms of The Lost You and L. Fading Hills (the latter embellished with the mere shadows of horns). Nonetheless, the poetic zenith of the album was achieved by the one piece that most resembled the hushed ambient intensity of Cold House: End of One Train Working

Chris Adams debuted solo with We Know About The Need (Anticon, 2007) under the moniker Bracken.