Massive Attack paired sublime musicianship with a gut-punch of a message about the world we've built online at their Melbourne show.
Massive Attack’s show in Melbourne last night is a reminder that art has always been political.
Music, as we all know, makes us feel something. It makes us feel something so deeply we want to move our bodies. In fun, joy, grief, anger; emotion. This has always been the way.
Pair that with extremely confronting, harsh, raw visual messaging on the effects of cyberspace on the world, and us as human beings, and you have a masterclass in protest and activism.
Before the band even walked out, the side screens ran a stream of guerrilla-style influencer content; all gleaming, ubiquitous perfection, a pointed jab at how tech companies like Palantir have used social media to smuggle their own ideas into the mainstream.
From there it built into something closer to a visual history of how we’ve been watched, sorted and sold: surveillance footage laced through fantasy imagery, meditating on how isolated the individual has become since the “liberated self” of the ’60s; cosmetics and cryogenics standing in for our terror of ageing and death; ICE, the IDF and the CIA flashed together as a warning to hold onto your data while you still can.
There were maps of empire and forever wars, mineral extraction and tax havens sitting alongside footage of first responders in Gaza and Lebanon, cut against the cold logic of arms industry stock prices. Old regimes, dead and living controversial figures, the mask and falsity of online personalities; all of it moving almost like psychological hypnosis, but turned for good, toward waking us up.
Massive Attack – Melbourne
- Tuesday 11 August, 2026
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Because it’s something we’re all already acutely aware of, which is why it felt so confronting to see it flashed in front of our eyes.
We’re beginning to admit, or have quietly known for longer than we’d like, that we’re overwhelmed and sick at what social media has become, and how the modern tech-focused world is harming the natural one. No longer is it used for connection and community. We can’t rely on any of it being real any more.
It holds us trapped in a world we know is wrong. It stops anyone imagining a better world.
I felt guilty for being at a show that meant so much to me, that I was enjoying and feeling a sense of joyous awe to be at; especially with Massive Attack making their return to Australia after 16 years, I was excited to be there.
But two things can exist at once. Enjoying the impeccable artistry in the music alone doesn’t mean I didn’t feel the terror and grief of the messaging.
Massive Attack – the music
Massive Attack are as talented, polished and impressive as ever. This music is sexy to me, there is the perfect mix across their discography of dark and slow and ambient, intense and building, rock and trip-hop and reggae and industrial post punk that they still easily embody live.
The two full drum kits on either end of the stage set up was an epic choice, with both drummers playing for their life; crisp and loud.
I am speechless at Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals. Her voice has matured with her in a way that brings a stunning headiness to her tone. She’s always had strength and body to her vocals, though typically it’s been more airy and light.
Last night it was operatic at times; if someone asked me what I thought an angel sounds like, I’d point to her. For most of her tracks I was sitting with eyes closed, head shaking in utter disbelief.
Deborah Miller matched her, note for note, in strength and vibrancy; pulling rousing applause for particular held notes that rolled across the floor. She also gave us Unfinished Symphony, and a reprieve to boogie.
Horace Andy was equally impressive, his clear voice ringing with his signature slow vocal wobble – no post-production filters here.
The set moved between their faster, more intense tracks, with footage and text flashing to keep us hooked, and the slower, ambient, dub-heavy ones, which gave us something to sway to and let the feeling of the music take over for a moment.
Plus, a cover of Regret of the Times by Seo Taiji and Boys, on theme with the political messaging reminding us that K-pop largely has it’s roots in civil protest.
The messaging
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Massive Attack have long worked with radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. In an interview in The Guardian, Curtis said:
“We increasingly live in a world run by modern technocrats, whether government thinktanks or data analysts or terror experts or the big global internet companies that use algorithms to tell us what we want. ”
It’s a world designed to look inevitable and overpowering; which is exactly why anyone who questions it gets branded as the fringe.
As journalist Andy Fitzgerald said, critics use ‘radical’ as an insult to dismiss unorthodox ideas as dangerous, unstable or extremist.
But, why are we the radicals?
The state of the world, in all it’s fear and division and war and marketing, marketing, marketing is the extreme.
They have made us, the folk striving for a world where everyone is safe, at peace and has basic needs, who want to spend our time nurturing community, sharing resources, being slow to regulate our bodies, paying attention to the natural world, shunning incorporeal crap like money and investing and career-climbing; sound like lazy, hippie freaks.
That’s not an accident. It’s messaging, put out by the only people who benefit from things staying exactly as they are (the rich and greedy), designed to stop us believing another life is possible.
Even as I write this, doing what I consider my ‘dream job’, I am quietly disgusted with how I spend my time. Sitting in a concrete office, eight and a half hours a day, staring at a computer screen and forcing myself to care about algorithms, engagement, follower counts, analytics. I used to care, until I realised how miserable it was making me. It’s making us all hollow and miserable, really. We know this, yet we can’t pull ourselves away.
That said, what I do care about is the people behind everything. I care about the culture, the arts, the events and exhibitions and artists themselves, and the number of people doing the work to make this all happen. I care about what this role represents, and how I can use it to champion it all from the ground up.
But Massive Attack’s Melbourne show forced us to confront these feelings last night, and it was the final push I needed. I hope I’m not alone.
I dream of a world where I can stand barefoot in a quiet field, fresh air deep in my lungs, open sky above me, calm and at peace and fulfilled, with nowhere to be except perhaps a veggie garden to harvest or a stranger to welcome in.
I dream of a world where I have a knowing that everyone is doing the same.
I will be deleting my social media today.
This is opinion, all views are solely my own.
Read more on Massive Attack’s substack here.
