Mezzanine is the third studio album by English electronic music group Massive Attack, released on 20 April 1998 by Circa and Virgin Records. The album saw the group exploring a darker aesthetic and more atmospheric style, influenced by electronica, post-punk, hip hop and dub music.

Mezzanine topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, becoming the group’s most commercially successful album to date. It ranked highly on many year-end lists.

It spawned four singles: “Risingson”, “Teardrop”, “Angel”, and “Inertia Creeps”.
The production of Mezzanine was a stressful process, and with tensions arising within the group, it almost split the band. They disagreed about the musical direction for the new material. As a demonstration of the project’s sound, Robert Del Naja initially produced instrumental demos sampling songs by post-punk bands Wire and Gang of Four, who were familiar to him as artists he had listened to in his teenage years. Grant Marshall supported this idea as he wanted to depart from the “urban soul” of their previous album, Protection, but Andrew Vowles was sceptical. The sessions continued with Vowles and Marshall working on bass and drum loops, while Del Naja continued to produce demos; out of the latter’s process, the group decided to release a new track, “Superpredators”, extensively sampling Siouxsie and the Banshees’ song “Metal Postcard”, for the soundtrack to the 1997 film The Jackal. The track was subsequently included on the Japanese version of Mezzanine.

The album marked the parting of Vowles due to creative conflicts, while reggae artist Horace Andy contributed to the album on multiple songs. 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.”The album’s working title was Damaged Goods, which was the name of Gang of Four’s 1978 debut single.

Mezzanine has been described as featuring trip hop and electronica, with a “dark claustrophobia” coupled with a melancholy. 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 always been present in the collective’s music. The album’s textured and deep tone relies heavily on abstract and ambient sounds.

Similar to their previous albums, several songs use one or more samples, ranging from Isaac Hayes to The Cure. 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”. 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.