Arriving in the spring of 1998, as Girl Power shot dayglo beams across the cultural landscape, and the Union flag-draped dream of Britpop died a slow, ugly death, Massive Attack’s prescient third album stood out like the towering black monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Foreboding and bleak, yet alien and beautiful, Mezzanine looked, felt and sounded like nothing that had come before. It barely even resembled the work of Massive Attack – at least not as the world had come to know them. That, as Robert Del Naja (the real name of graffiti artist-turned sprechgesang-rapper 3D), the record’s chief creative force explains, was entirely intentional.
“It was a chrysalis moment,” he told Wallpaper* in 2018. “We were trying to emerge as something different. We had gone through that whole ‘90s thing of being the new kids on the block and becoming part of this movement called trip-hop, which was like a small satellite feeding off Britpop. And none of us felt a part of that. We just wanted to firmly establish our own identity.”
