Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Entertainment Weekly	A−
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
Muzik	10/10
NME	8/10
Pitchfork Media	8.1/10 (1998) 9.3/10 (2017)
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Uncut

Mezzanine is the third studio album by English trip hop group Massive Attack, released on 20 April 1998 by Virgin Records. It was the first album to be produced by Neil Davidge, along with the group. The entire album was provided on their website for legal download many months before the physical release was announced, one of the first major uses of the MP3 format by a commercial organisation.

Mezzanine topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, becoming the band's most commercially successful album to date. It saw the band expanding their trip hop sound to electronica stylings, with diverse influences from rock, hip hop and dub genres.

The production of Mezzanine was a stressful process, with tensions arising within the group. The album was meant to be released in December 1997, but was delayed by four months, with Del Naja spending most of the time in the studio "making tracks, tearing them apart, f***ing [sic] them up, panicking, then starting again."

Mezzanine was a pretty sketchy album in terms of the way we worked, because the band, as reported a lot at that time, were not getting on. So I'd be in the studio working with one of the members and someone else would come in, then the person I had been working with would leave and I'd have to change the track I was working on because they didn't want to work on that track, they wanted to work on something different. Sometimes I'd be working on perhaps four different tracks in one day, which was a pretty messy way to work.

The album's working title was Damaged Goods, which was the name of the Gang of Four's 1978 debut single.

"Teardrop" became the opening theme to the American medical drama television series House, which ran on Fox from 2004 to 2012.

Musically, Mezzanine is a major departure from the jazzy and laidback sound of the first two albums, Blue Lines and Protection, invoking the dark undercurrents which had always been present in the collective's music. The album's textured and deep tone relies heavily on abstract and ambient sounds, as demonstrated in the song "Angel" among others.

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