Massive Attack

Massive Attack came out of the Wild Bunch, the Bristol sound system that ran the city's parties in the eighties; Robert '3D' Del Naja and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall have kept the group going for three decades since. 'Teardrop' is built on a harpsichord figure written by producer Neil Davidge over a beat lifted from a sped-up Les McCann record, with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins singing across the top of it. Mezzanine (1998) is the album that made trip hop sound like architecture rather than atmosphere, and it remains the group's defining work. In 2018 it became the first album ever encoded into synthetic DNA — researchers at ETH Zurich sealed the strands into glass spheres and mixed them into spray paint. The group returned to the stage in 2024 with their first shows in five years.

From the notes for Episode 06 · fact-checked Sep 23, 2026.