Massive Attack’s 100th Window - the Anti-Massive masterpiece

Plus Boards of Canada

“An ode to the Hymn of the Big Wheel” @annajanemcintyre

Before we get going, I was happy to see that I picked up quite a lot of subscriptions for my post about the best melodies in electronic music. A warm welcome to you all - and if you want to see the kind of thing that Line Noise offers, here are some of my favourite posts from 2025.

Who killed 2-Step? MJ Cole and UKG’s second album syndrome

Life’s a GAS with Wolfgang Voigt

10 dub albums that changed my world (Pt 1)

Bending reality with Basic Unit’s Timeline, The Unconsoled of drum & bass

Deepest Burnt - 5 more tracks to appreciate the genius of Pepe Bradock

SHERELLE on depression, pressure and normalising moody DJing

Mazzy Star at the rave - or why DJs should grow a backbone

And now onward, with Massive Attack…

Massive Attack’s 100th Window - the Anti-Massive masterpiece

Blue Lines, Massive Attack’s debut album, makes me think of warm summer days and lingering sunshine; 100th Window, their fourth, evokes icy English houses, freezing mist and a lingering chest cold.

This was the journey Massive Attack took in 12 short years, from April 1991, when Blue Lines was released, to February 2003 and 100th Window. It’s no wonder, then, that 100th Window is generally regarded as a glaring error by the Bristol band, an album that fans ignore rather than bother to engage with.

It’s not even a Massive Attack album, many believe, with Mushroom having left in 1998, shortly after the release of Mezzanine; and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall opting out of the production, leaving Robert “3D” Del Naja and producer Neil Davidge at the controls.

“There was a lot of friction,” Del Naja told The Telegraph, “and that made it difficult for me and G as well.” Marshall said that he was “a spectator” during the making of 100th Window, partly because he had just become a father but also because he wasn’t happy with the songs. Del Naja, meanwhile, felt that he had been abandoned.

For a long time, I felt the same way. I have a memory of buying the CD single of Special Cases, the album’s lead single, taking it back to my shared South London house and something about it not feeling quite right, like in the days after the flu has lifted but your head still isn’t quite back in the orbit. Where’s the warmth? Where’s the reggae, the hip hop, the dub?

Mezzanine, the band’s third album, was a fiercely dark record. But songs like Angel still had something of the old Massive Attack feel, even as it fought against the waves of crashing paranoia and distrust. 100th Windows is closer, perhaps, to Mezzanine than any other of the band’s album. But there is a gaping wound of difference between them.

There’s a Guardian review of 100th Window in which journalist Alexis Petridis mentions that Del Naja apparently liked to write and record “at the end of a lengthy bender” and 100th Window has the stomach-lurching, teeth-jangling emptiness that suggests that Del Naja’s hedonistic nights could end up in an unspeakably bleak place. There’s nothing to cling to on the album, a record of chillingly frosty surfaces and obtuse angles.

Circumstances didn’t help. Being without Daddy G robbed the band of its affable heart, while two weeks after the release of 100th Window, Del Naja was arrested as part of Operation Ore, a crackdown on child pornography. Del Naja was innocent and the investigation was swiftly dropped but it left a funny feeling of paranoia lingering around 100th Window. This wasn’t the kind of record you wanted to visit. It felt cursed and spiteful, a record that might give you paper cuts and splinters.

And so I dismissed 100th Window and got on with my life, happy in the knowledge that Massive Attack had made a perfect trio of outstanding records. Until I came back to 100th Window recently and realised that I was not wrong, exactly, but had missed the appeal of a uniquely harrowing but very beautiful record.

In many ways, 100th Window reminds me of the Happy Mondays’ Yes Please!, a similarly misunderstood fourth studio album recorded in equally unhappy circumstances, as the Manchester band seem to come apart on its very axis. With Yes Please! the result was a uniquely desolate funk that I adore, the Caribbean vibes of the record’s recording coming up across Shaun Ryder at his lowest ebb.

With 100th Window, 3D jettisoned much of what had made Massive Attack so great - the hip hop, the dub and the jovial sound of a mic being passed in the studio - to make a kind of Anti-Massive, a record laid down over hundreds of hours of intense studio time, with rock band Lupine Howl being fed minimal loops through their headphones and Del Naja using a strobe light to dictate the intensity of their performance.

100th Window sounds like that: minimal, dry and very worked, a freezing cold void exposed at the record’s centre. There’s no fun here, no messing around in the studio and seeing what happens; 100th Window is hard work, you can sense the hundreds of hours that went into its creation, the tense headaches at the end of another strobe-filled studio day.

Guitars and live drums dominate the sound of 100th Window. And this is mixed with the kind of intricate, scrabbling electronic effects that were the mode among microhouse producers like Akufen (who actually remixed Massive Attack around the time) and Isolée at the start of the 2000s. Vangelis, too, was a big influence on the album’s glacial electronic sound, with Massive Attack covering the Greek composer’s Blade Runner soundtrack with the Heritage Orchestra in 2006.

100th Window has an arid, unsettling sound that feels very treble-y, the sound of a top end being endlessly re-mastered. The album’s cover, which features life-size human figures made of glass being shot by ball bearings, feel very appropriate: this is an album that is shattering and deadly.

100th Window is not a nice album, in any way. But why does it have to be? Massive Attack had done fun, they’d done warmth, they’d done reggae-infused hip-hop-pop and the early 2000s was the time for something different, an awkward and yet beautifully shaped electronic pop sound that freezes the heart in place.

You can hear this desire for change in the record’s treatment of vocalists. 3D lends his voice to four songs, as he has done so often in the past: Future Proof, Butterfly Caught, Small Time Shot Away and Antistar. But he doesn’t sound like the 3D of old, the 3D you might know for his mystically jovial rap on Blue Lines.

On 100th Window it sounds like 3D is singing to himself, his close mic’d voice more an uncertain whisper in the dark than the sound system MC he once used to be. He doesn’t, in fact, sound anything like he does on older Massive Attack records, as if Del Naja has had to put on a disguise to get away from the overwhelming bad vibes in the studio.

Even more remarkable is the treatment of legendary reggae singer Horace Andy on Everywhen and Name Taken. By this point Andy was a familiar voice on Massive Attack records, his lilting falsetto known to millions on Massive songs like Hymn of the Big Wheel and Spying Glass. (As well as his own solo record, of course.)

But on 100th Window Horace sounds almost entirely unlike himself, his voice robbed of its characteristic vibrato and trapped in the upper corners of the mix. It’s unnerving - and yet it kind of works, if you can forget, for a moment, the fixed ideas that you have of Horace Andy.

I enjoy all of these song - and especially the epic album closer Antistar, a song that feels malevolently hypnotic, like Kaa in The Jungle Book singing his seductive song to the unknowing Mowgli. Del Naja’s vocals here are perfectly judged, a ruinous balance between vulnerability and revulsion, while the strings are among the best in the band’s career.

But 100th Window really belongs to Sinead O’Connor - in fact, I think it was her death in 2023 that made me go back to the album. Obviously, in the circumstances, any song with O’Connor’s vocals hit hard but What Your Soul Sings, Special Cases and A Prayer for England - her three songs here - sounded like a revelation, her angelic, pained voice giving life to 100th Window’s antiseptic environments.

Massive Attack have always been excellent at working with guest vocalists, teasing career best performances out of the likes of Tracey Thorn. Had they teamed up with O’Connor earlier in their career - on, say, the studio-pop reggae of Production - the combination would doubtlessly have given O’Connor a far bigger showcase for her talents than on the reviled 100th Window.

And yet her three songs on Massive’s fourth album are career bests for both sides. On What Your Soul Sings, O’Connor’s word-less vocal floats impossibly stretched over the song’s first minutes as screeching guitar effects rattle the nerves, before she swoops back in with a song to save us all, a beautifully sparse harp melody, eerie chords and grotesquely skuttling electronic beats creating an electronic pop sound that can’t seem to decide if it is destined for heaven or hell.

O’Connor’s vocal is lethal, as she sings a song that seems to encourage us all to open our hearts to love, without ever being entirely convinced of the idea, like an early version of Björk’s All Is Full Of Love that was scrapped for being far too ambivalent about its fate.

Special Cases is maybe the closest 100th Window gets to Mezzanine, with its prominent bass line, hip hop-ish drums and creeping strings, recorded with a 50-piece orchestra; but the rust and dirt of Mezzanine have been replaced with an unsettling clean sound that brings to mind a outer-galactic operating theatre.

O’Connor, meanwhile, appears to be having a moment of crisis - “check yourself for your own shit”, she sings, “and don’t be making out like it’s all his.” - giving the song the unmistakeable air of someone at the end of their tether, singing from the perilous moment when depression becomes more attractive than ever.

Amazingly, the song came together very quickly. “It was one of the easiest songs that happened on this album because it was very direct and simple and very quick,” 3D said of Special Cases on the record’s interview disc. “And when we played it for Sinead she just went ‘Yeah I really love that I want to do something with that’ and she just wrote a song really quickly and it all just happened over night compared to the other songs.”

The third song, A Prayer for England, is genuinely haunting. O’Connor sings of children being slain, the Holy Spirit and failing teachers over a pulsating post-punk bass line and synth wash, as what sounds like an actual prayer - and one of impressive intensity and feeling - becomes more of a song of dark warning. Poor children of English, indeed.

Reviews of 100th Window were mixed, a big climb down for a band of critical darlings. (The BBC review makes for particularly bad reading these days, calling Sinead O’Connor “the nutty priestess” and the album “lazy”.) Interestingly, roughly half the reviews seem to see 100th Window as a Mezzanine clone, while the other half take it to task for abandoning the Massive Attack sound.

History, too, has not been kind to the album, with the band themselves hardly leaping to its defence. In 2007 Marshall promised that the band’s new album would sound very different to 100th Window, proclaiming that: “I’m here to put the Black back into Massive Attack.”

According to Setlist.fm, 100th Window lags behind Mezzanine, Blue Lines and Heligoland in terms of representation in the band’s live shows (although actually ahead of Protection) and there have been no attempts to re-promote the record on its 10th or 20th anniversaries.

You can understand why the band might feel this way. Marshall wasn’t even involved in the record, while the early 2000s marked a nadir in Del Naja’s personal life that he would probably rather forget.

Heligoland, the band’s fifth studio album, which followed in 2010, wasn’t great. But it did, at least, sound notably like Massive Attack, with its soulful edges, organic feel and huge range of guest vocalists

100th Window doesn’t sound like Massive Attack; it doesn’t sound like Sinead O’Connor; it doesn’t sound like anyone, really. Instead, 100th Window is isolation; it is sadness; it is disconnect; it is trapped in between worlds and disappointed with both. It’s not a place you’d want to live in, in other words; but it makes for a harrowing, devastating visit.

Some listening

Boards of Canada - Some Old Tunes 1985 - 1996

Now there’s a Christmas present for you: on December 24 an enterprising Boards of Canada fan uploaded 11 old BoC tracks to YouTube in sparkling audio quality.

Are they legit? The rabid BoC fans online seem to think so and they certainly match a lot of the old (and sometimes rather scratchy) early songs that can be found on collections like A Few Old Tunes, a cassette compilation on BoC’s Music70 label in 1996 that the band apparently gave out to various friends. (Although, as you might imagine, there’s no concrete information about where the 11 tracks came from and how they came to be in such sparkling audio quality.)

But also, just listen to them: spectrum, 5 9 78, bmx track and all sound so perfectly eerie, so sadly wistful, so improbably gorgeous that they can surely only be BoC in all their early Caledonian glory. And right now I don’t want to listen to anything else.