Mezzanine

Del Naja conceived it in 1997 around a darker sound, sampling post-punk bands, and in 1998 he named PiL's Metal Box as a touchstone for using guitars in a new way. The working title was Damaged Goods, after Gang of Four's first single. Due in December 1997, it was four months late. Q's 1999 account has Del Naja working in a Cornwall cottage while Vowles and Marshall used the Christchurch studio, not at the same time, and explains the final title as a floor between floors, a stuck lift. The cover is a beetle photographed by Nick Knight at the Natural History Museum.

Mezzanine went to number one in the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Iceland, was their first album on the Billboard 200, and had sold 2.5 million copies by April 2000. It won the Q Award for Best Album and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Rolling Stone's Barney Hoskyns felt that texture sometimes came at the expense of tunes, while AllMusic gave it full marks. It appears in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums. For its twentieth anniversary it was stored in 920,000 strands of DNA, and a 2019 remaster added Mad Professor's dubs.