Mezzanine topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, becoming the group's most commercially successful album to date. It has appeared on multiple "best albums" lists, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. The album spawned four singles, "
Risingson", "
Teardrop", "
Angel" and "
Inertia Creeps", which also variously charted in the United Kingdom.
Background and recording
Mezzanine was conceptualised by lead Massive Attack member
Robert Del Naja in 1997, who wanted to focus on exploring a darker audiovisual aesthetic with distinct influences. The production of the album was a stressful process; with tensions arising, it led to disagreements that almost split the group, including discouragement from
Andrew Vowles. As a demonstration of the project's sound, Del Naja initially produced instrumental demos sampling songs by British
post-punk bands such as
Wire and
Gang of Four, who had been familiar to him as artists he had enjoyed as a teenager.
Grant Marshall supported this direction as he wanted to depart from the "
urban soul" of their previous album, Protection, but Vowles was sceptical.[3]
The sessions continued with Vowles and Marshall working on bass and drum loops, while Del Naja continued to produce demos. The album was originally set to be released in December 1997, but was delayed by four months, with Del Naja spending most of the time in the studio "making tracks, tearing them apart, fucking [sic] them up, panicking, then starting again."[4] Before the album's release, the group released "Superpredators", a non-album song extensively sampling
Siouxsie and the Banshees' song "
Metal Postcard", for the soundtrack to the 1997 film The Jackal;[5] the track was subsequently included on the Japanese version of Mezzanine.[6]
Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles left the group soon after the album's release, due to creative conflicts, while reggae artist and Massive Attack collaborator
Horace Andy contributed to the album on multiple songs.[7] The album's working title was Damaged Goods, which was the name of Gang of Four's 1978
debut single.[3]
Mezzanine was a pretty sketchy album in terms of the way we worked, because the band, as reported a lot at that time, were not getting on. So I'd be in the studio working with one of the members and someone else would come in, then the person I had been working with would leave and I'd have to change the track I was working on because they didn't want to work on that track, they wanted to work on something different. Sometimes I'd be working on perhaps four different tracks in one day, which was a pretty messy way to work.
Mezzanine has been described as a
trip hop[10] and
electronica album[1] with moods of "dark
claustrophobia" and melancholy.[2] Musically, the album is a major departure from the jazzy and laidback sound of the first two albums, Blue Lines and Protection, invoking the dark undercurrents which had previously only been vaguely present in the group's music. The album's textured and deep tone relies heavily on abstract and
ambient sounds, heavy emphasis on bass, and influences from
alternative rock.
Similar to their previous albums, several songs use one or more samples, which range from artists typically sampled in trip hop such as
Isaac Hayes and various
drum breaks, to bands like
the Cure and
the Velvet Underground. In particular, "Inertia Creeps" samples Turkish
çiftetelli music which Del Naja recorded after partying in
Istanbul, with his recorded tape subsequently becoming the rhythmic base for the song.[11] In 1998,
Manfred Mann sued Massive Attack for unauthorised use of a sample of the song "Tribute" from
Manfred Mann's Earth Band's
eponymous 1972 album, used on "Black Milk".[12] The song has subsequently appeared as "Black Melt" on later releases and at live performances, with the sample removed. Later digital editions of Mezzanine have retained the original song, with Mann being added to the songwriting credits.[13][14]
The album received significant critical acclaim, which praised the collective's new sound. Rolling Stone's
Barney Hoskyns, although praising the album, pointed to its flaws: "Sometimes rhythm and texture are explored at the expense of memorable tunes, and the absence of the bizarre
Tricky [...] only highlights the flat, monotonous rapping of the group's 3-D."[22]Robert Christgau of The Village Voice gave the album a two-star honorable mention rating and selected "Risingson" and "Man Next Door" as highlights.[29]
John Bush of
AllMusic had positive words for the album's song "Inertia Creeps", saying it "could well be the highlight, another feature for just the core threesome. With eerie atmospherics, fuzz-tone guitars, and a wealth of effects, the song could well be the best production from the best team of producers the electronic world had ever seen."[15]
Years after the album was released, it was placed on several best-of lists in the UK and the United States. In 2000, Q magazine placed Mezzanine at number 15 on its list of "The 100 Greatest British Albums Ever". In 2013, it was placed at 215 on NME's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[1] In 2003, the album was ranked number 412 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time",[30] and while it was not included in the 2012 update of the list, it reentered the 2020 update ranked at number 383.[31]
By April 2000, the album had sold 2.5 million copies worldwide.[32] As of February 2010, it had sold 560,000 copies in the United States, according to
Nielsen SoundScan.[33]
Mezzanine DNA
On the 20th anniversary of Mezzanine's release, the record was encoded into
synthetic DNA—a first for an album. The project was in collaboration with TurboBeads Labs in Switzerland; the digital audio of the album was stored in the form of genetic information. The audio was then compressed using
Opus, coded in
DNA molecules—with 920,000 short DNA strands containing all the data—and then poured into 5,000 tiny glass beads.[34]
20th anniversary reissue
The album was remastered and reissued for its 20th anniversary. The two-CD anniversary edition was released on 23 August 2019, and comes with a bonus disc of previously unreleased dub mixes by
Mad Professor, which were originally intended to be released on a Mezzanine remix album. A triple-LP vinyl version was also slated to be released; initially delayed from its proposed release date, the triple-LP version was eventually canceled altogether.[35]
In lieu of the vinyl reissue, the Mad Professor remixes were released as a pink-coloured 12-inch vinyl single entitled Massive Attack v Mad Professor Part II (Mezzanine Remix Tapes '98) on 20 September 2019.[36]
The Mad Professor remixes include "Metal Banshee" (an unreleased dub version of "Superpredators", which was a reworked cover of "
Metal Postcard" originally by
Siouxsie and the Banshees), and "Wire", a track recorded for the soundtrack to the film Welcome to Sarajevo.[37][38]
* Sales figures based on certification alone. ^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. ‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
^Prasad, Anil.
"Massive Attack – Massive aggressive". Innerviews. Retrieved 10 July 2013. The music came from nights out in Istanbul. There's some mad music there at some belly dancing shows which are pretty embarrassingly tourist-orientated. But the music was fucking really cool. I got some tapes and I was in the studio when we were working on this music. [...] [W]e started writing this new beat from it and so it was really cool, d'ya-know-what-I-mean?