Mezzanine

Massive Attack made this album while actively falling apart. The three members disagreed so fundamentally about musical direction that they wound up recording in separate studios. Producer Neil Davidge later described the process as messy. Founding member Mushroom left the group shortly after the album's release. Q magazine voted the Mezzanine sessions among the most destructive recording processes of the era. None of that is audible in the music. What is audible is something darker and more claustrophobic and more controlled than anything the band had made before, and it is one of the greatest electronic albums ever recorded.

The production approach was built on collision. Breakbeat samples were run through guitar pedals. Dub bass lines were dropped under post-punk guitar figures. The Velvet Underground appeared on "Risingson." Isaac Hayes appeared on "Exchange." Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, who had recently ended a relationship with Robert Del Naja, sang "Teardrop" in a state that she later described as raw and open in a way she had rarely been. Her voice on that track is one of the most extraordinary performances in the trip-hop canon, and it became the theme song for the American television series House. Horace Andy, the Jamaican reggae vocalist who had appeared on the band's debut, returned to sing "Angel," which sounds like a dub record dissolving into something far more sinister over six minutes.

Where the band's first two albums invited you somewhere warm and nocturnal, Mezzanine locks the doors and turns off the light. The tension between the people making it became the texture of the record itself.