Massive Attack to tour Australia for first time in 16 years

Massive Attack are set to tour Australia for the first time in 16 years.

The influential British trip-hop group, made up of Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, will play Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in August. The upcoming tour will be the band’s fourth appearance in Australia and their first Australian shows since 2010.

Massive Attack recently released their first new music in six years, a collaboration with Tom Waits titled Boots on the Ground. Awarding it four stars, the Guardian’s music critic Alexis Petridis described the track as “dark, disturbing, ominous, with a distinct streak of WTF? running through it … music perfectly fitting for the times”.

Formed in Bristol in 1988, Massive Attack are pioneers of the trip-hop genre – a dark sound of hip-hop rhythms, soul samples, dub bass and atmospheric electronics. Their 1991 debut Blue Lines was a touchstone, among the most influential albums of its era. Their biggest hits include Unfinished Sympathy and Teardrop.

They have sold more than 13m copies of their five albums: Blue Lines, Protection (1994), Mezzanine (1998), 100th Window (2003) and Heligoland (2010).

The band were briefly prevented from entering Australia in 2003 when their visas were cancelled after Del Naja was arrested as part of a UK police crackdown on child sexual abuse images. He was never charged and the investigation was dropped due to lack of evidence, but Del Naja claimed a British tabloid called the Australian embassy and told them about the allegations, leading to the band having to postpone their Australian tour.

Though their visas were eventually reinstated, Del Naja later told the Guardian that the Australian tour was “the hardest time in my life. I had to go on tour with those allegations in the air, which was horrendous”.

Some internet sleuths have speculated that Del Naja is secretly the Bristolian street artist Banksy – a theory fuelled by overlaps in Massive Attack’s tour dates with the appearance of Banksy murals around the world, including some in Melbourne in 2003.

In recent years, Massive Attack made headlines for their political activism rather than new music. In April, Robert Del Naja was among 500 people arrested in London on suspicion of showing support for a proscribed organisation after attending a mass protest against the ban on Palestine Action.

In September, Massive Attack became the first major-label act to pull their catalogue from Spotify in protest at founder Daniel Ek investing €600m (A$975m, £520m) in the military AI company Helsing. The band, which has boycotted performing in Israel since 1999, also signed on to an initiative called No Music for Genocide, where more than 400 artists and labels blocked their music from streaming services in Israel.

And in 2024, the band staged a one-day festival in Bristol that was 100% powered by renewable energy, titled Act 1.5 – a reference to the 2015 UN climate treaty that asked countries to keep global heating to under a 1.5C threshold.

Presale for their Australian shows begins 4 June, and tickets go on general sale on 5 June.