Massive Attack: Boots on the Ground (ft Tom Waits) review – first single in a decade is a dark hymn for our times

(Play It Again Sam)
Unsettling breathing, arrhythmic clatter, gloomy piano and military snares underpin a Beefheartian portrayal of a boorish warmonger on the band’s ominous return

Even by the standards of a band noted for their unhurried approach, Massive Attack’s recorded output has dwindled to a trickle in recent years. They’ve seldom been out of the press, but less as a result of their music than their political campaigning: frontman Robert Del Naja was among the 500 people arrested at last Saturday’s Palestine Action protest. It is six years since they last released any new music – a trio of YouTube videos on which their music effectively acted as a soundbed for spoken-word pieces about global system change – and a decade since they released something you could actually buy, a single called The Spoils. Their most recent album, Heligoland, came out in 2010: Taylor Swift was still a country star, Harry Styles was still at school, Instagram and TikTok had yet to be launched.

It means that any new release automatically carries a sense of event, particularly if you’re old enough to remember how significantly Massive Attack altered the musical landscape of the 90s. You could formulate an argument that their debut album, Blue Lines, was the single most influential British album of its era: it spawned an entire subgenre, trip-hop, in its wake; 35 years on, you can still hear its echoes everywhere, from the mainstream pop of Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey to the nu-soul of Joy Crookes and Greentea Peng to the endless swathes of anonymous “lo-fi beats” that get millions of streams on Spotify.