The Spoils (feat. Hope Sandoval)

It's about a girl who is in love with someone, she keeps at a distance. She is in love with the illusion of the person, rather than having the person in her life. By never having this man in her life she can love him forever in her illusion, the illusion is perfect for her.

It's about her pure love, unchanged by the fact that he's gone and the dissonance between his good vs bad traits, as seen by her.

It's about in my mind someone you deeply love and how you have to set them free because you love them so much their happiness means more than yours and being with them would ruin them maybe because she feels she is too problematic or even dying and she doesn't want to hurt them so in her own pain she knows he may have feelings for her but she won't let him know the extent of hers and lets him go off with another simpler women that might make him happier and she'll just live with the sweet memories until she dies because she can't hurt him and she knows somehow she will

I think this is a song about that moment when you just finish a relationship, and maybe the other person alrerady have a "new one" ("I don't even know her but I hope that she comforts you tonight"). You have all those memories fresh and hanging around and hurt you about the person ("But I somehow slowly love you"); the good aspects of the person an the bad ones ("Well, I somehow slowly know you And wanna keep you away"). Yeah, it's about the fresh memories of a recent breakup.

I believe this is about a woman who’s is a new relationship with someone she suspects has another woman elsewhere (“the spoils” of the relationship). She has a growing suspicion ("bad feeling") about this. And she is conflicted between slowly falling in love a man she believes or imagines she's met and keeping a distance from him as she comes to know him better.

I discovered this song almost four months ago, when I was going through some great changes in my life. In a sea of shit, I was discovering I was falling in love with a beautiful soul and that created a sort of sadness I never felt before, like I was remembering something from the future. I discovered that the beautiful soul was feeling the same and we were creating something new, „slowly love you, slowly know you”, we were carving the sound to the core of the vibration, we grew, we were Light. And then, Darkness came, again: heavy, consuming, absurd: „I got that feeling...”

I think it’s about someone who has just died. (I hope that she comforts you tonight). She wants to stay with him but she should not.

She is in a relationship where her partner is cheating on her. She loves them for who they are but knows this is bad for her.

Hey, Massive Attack have always been revolutionary thinkers and poets. Maybe the song is about an AI that slowly develops conscience and feelings. And in her exploration somehow she understands she's getting outside the initail purpose that she was built for. And she's entrenched evaluating what can resemble a sensation of jealousy but more in regards to her bodyless condition than towards a concrete human being. She's evaluating. Or he.

She is expressing how she feels about a love interest. We are not meant to guess the scenario. Let her explanation be enough.