It appears the rumors of a Winter tour that was speculated about a few months ago turned out to be true mostly. Massive Attack will undertake a 28 date tour early next year across Europe, and will use this opportunity to debut "new material" according to a press release that went out today to the media. Details about the contents of this "new material" will be revealed shortly.
Young Fathers pictured here in the Massive Attack studios earlier this year. They will be the support act for all 28 dates of Massive Attack's European 2016 tour.
Best case scenario its the new album (hereby dubbed LP6) that Massive Attack have been working on sporadically since the end of the Heligoland tour in 2010. From what information we know, likely collaborators on LP6 include Run The Jewels, Young Fathers, Tricky and Jack Barnett of These New Puritans.
If it was LP6 though, I don't see why they wouldn't announce it now instead of just branding it "new material", so I'm thinking its more along the lines of a EP possibly as a prelude to LP6 (e.g. how the Splitting The Atom EP was to Heligoland). Either way we're find out soon.
Here is one revealing quote from 3D concerning LP6 that he made last year.
“At the moment I’m thinking that on this record we’ve been concentrating on songs and the inspirations for them. Working with Adam Curtis last year saw us hear a lot of old pop songs which I guess made us look at things in a different way. We’ve always worked under a DJ-based ideology incorporating the beats and rhythms first, so what we’ve been doing is just straight up songs and melodies, now whether that will fit into the history of the band, I don’t know, but it’s a different approach so it’s interesting to see how successful that will be.””
Back to the 2016 tour, it will start in Dublin in mid January and finish up in Paris in late February, and will feature the Scottish hip-hop trio Young Fathers as the support act for all 25 dates. You can click the button label below to to be taken to the Upcoming Events page were all the shows are listed.
The newly revamped MassiveAttack.com features this one blurry yet cryptic new image.
No discussion yet of any dates outside of Europe, but I get the sense that this is the warmup tour for a global sojurn later in 2016 to coincide hopefully with the announcement of LP6. So any international MA fans should just hang on in there a bit longer hopefully! So all in all, this is good news for the faithful fans out there. It also helps put the relative disappointment of the cancelled Dismaland gig into perspective.
Finally, the official Massive Attack website was updated to advertise the 2016 tour dates, even though apart from that, its still quite blah... No other content at all besides one cryptic blurry image. Hopefully MA.COM will become a proper website and not just a tour list page by the time of the LP6 launch.
After a few mild teases in the last few days on their social media channels, Massive Attack announced today the arrival of a new 3 track EP entitled Eutopia. So at least we can say that 2020 isn’t a total write-off at least!
Another year nearly over and I'd thought I'd better write a quick blog post about what Massive Attack have been up to in 2017. Compared to 2016, this year has been relatively quiet, but we can only hope behind the scenes that its also been a good productive year for the band and that we can expect new music (and maybe, just maybe, a new album!) in 2018.
We're roughly halfway through Massive Attack's 2016 tour, which has just finished its UK leg before hitting the rest of Europe, so its about time for a news update post covering all that's been going on in the last couple of weeks.