Massive Attack
Afterpay Arena, Sydney
Sunday, August 9th
It’s funny to consider that once upon a time, back when their classic 1991 debut album Blue Lines was released, Massive Attack was actually considered “chill-out music”.
The 2026 Massive Attack live experience is about as far removed from “chill” as you can get.
A collective formed in Bristol, England in 1988 that now consists of two constant members Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, the group don’t want you to simply engage with the music, but also a pulverising visual experience that throws everything from hypnotic rows of LED digits to vapid social influencers to horrific war statistics at you in rapid succession. It’s a lot.
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Del Naja, Marshall and their live players are content to perform in the shadows, making the show more akin to a semi-anonymous band scoring a confronting art film about living in a dystopia teetering on the edge of an apocalypse.
Even if Massive Attack’s musical output has tapered off over the years – only two albums and a handful of EPs have emerged thus far in the 21st century – its political fire has clearly only increased in intensity. (They may have recently been banned from Singapore for displaying a Palestinian flag on stage, but there’s no shying away from displaying it on a giant screen tonight along with a call to “Free Palestine”.)
The setlist pulls mainly from 1998 high watermark Mezzanine, whose dark, dubby beats exhale out into the arena like a potent strain of paranoia-inducing weed smoke (see: the rolling bass monster “Risingson” and perfectly named “Inertia Creeps”).
Like an intense, brooding cousin of Gorillaz where nothing ever feels good, Massive Attack have always been a group built on collaboration. The feature artists – former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, Deborah Miller and Jamaican roots reggae singer Horace Andy – do not disappoint.
Miller does an incredible job of singing Shara Nelson’s parts on “Safe from Harm” and “Unfinished Sympathy”, hitting the high notes on the latter with such grace that it causes the audience to roar with appreciation.
Andy lends wisdom and depth to classics “Angel” and “Hymn of the Big Wheel”, while Fraser brings some much-needed lightness to “Black Milk”, Tim Buckley cover “Song to the Siren” and show closer “Teardrop”. Both performers conjure a hazy otherworldliness: Andy the ancient oak tree; Fraser the angelic sprite flittering among its branches.
The music is more than enough on its own but combined with the visual onslaught – which gets so overstimulating and intense at times that you need to look away – the show becomes something else entirely.
Although Massive Attack do an effective job of hitting the audience with a necessary wake-up call to the many horrors of the modern world (AI, facial recognition software, war in the Middle East, genocide, government corruption – take your pick), it does, unfortunately, have the music playing second fiddle throughout a lot of the performance. More than once you’ll find yourself reading mortifying statistics about attacks in Gaza, only to realise you’re not really paying attention to the music being played.
While the songs are forced to yield primary focus to the giant screens a little too often, it’s still a testament to the strength of Massive Attack’s music – the best of which was released back in the Nineties – that it can still draw an arena full of punters decades on from release.
Enjoyment of a Massive Attack show in 2026, then, wholly depends on where you sit on the spectrum of “having a cold bucket of stark reality poured over your head” versus “I just came here to listen to some tunes I love”, but there’s no denying the Bristol agitators are as vital and potent a force as they’ve ever been.
