Massive Attack

Since 1988 · United Kingdom

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Mezzanine (1998)

Mezzanine is Massive Attack's coldest, most guitar-heavy record, layering industrial textures and dub bass under a set of vocal performances pulled from very different traditions. "Teardrop" is the clear centerpiece, Elizabeth Fraser's vocal — reportedly recorded after the band turned down a bigger-name singer for the part — floating over a heartbeat-like rhythm and a harpsichord figure that gives the song its unusual gravity. "Angel" and "Inertia Creeps" show the album's darker register, closer to industrial rock than to the hip-hop-inflected sound of the band's earlier records. It remains the point where Massive Attack's music turned decisively toward dread rather than the warmer melancholy of their earlier work.

Sleeve notes

Massive Attack

Mezzanine · 1998

Massive Attack formed in Bristol in the late 1980s out of the Wild Bunch, a sprawling local sound-system collective whose members went in several different musical directions once it dissolved. Robert "3D" Del Naja, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles built the core group around slow, bass-heavy productions that pulled from hip-hop, dub, and soul without committing fully to any of them, working with a rotating cast of guest vocalists rather than a single frontperson.

Blue Lines (1991) is widely treated as a foundational record for what critics later labeled trip-hop, a term the band has never been fond of. Mezzanine (1998) pushed the sound toward something colder and more guitar-driven, incorporating industrial textures and reggae singer Horace Andy's vocals alongside a widely noted guest turn from Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser. Vowles left the group not long after that album, and Del Naja and Marshall have continued recording and touring as Massive Attack in the years since, at a considerably slower and more selective pace.