Massive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good The trip hop group’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” which turned 30 years old this pandemic winter, evokes the urban soundscape of a lost era. Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty The singer Shara Nelson, center, with Massive Attack's Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles (left) and Robert "3D" Del Naja. This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known as trip hop, a bastard genre of languorous tempos and ponderous atmospherics that was once a staple of coffee shops in Amsterdam before becoming the background music at your local Starbucks. Like punk before it, trip hop was appropriated and commercialized nearly at the point of its inception, confounding its legacy. Chris Kraus claims that punk’s “golden age lasted somewhere between four and eighteen months”; trip hop had at least a few years in the early nineties, before it was eventually stripped of its druggy, underground associations and became our era’s version of lounge music.