When Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett both lost their fathers, their ground shifted with grief taking a hold of them both. Not long after, they took an extended trip to India. They spent time in a place where death is spoken about in public, where ritual and music sit close together, where mourning has a visible place in daily life. They have talked about that period as something they needed to live through, and about India as a place that reset how they think about mortality, with Albarn pointing to Varanasi and the Ganges as part of that shift. You can feel that experience at the center of their new album, The Mountain, a record that begins in loss and keeps moving without trying to tidy it up.
Gorillaz has always been their way of building a larger room than a normal band can hold. The cartoon band is not a gimmick, it's an art form that gives them characters and scenes, plus just enough distance to say certain things more directly. It also gives them permission to change the rules whenever they need to, to let a song be funny, bleak, political, tender, or all of it in the same breath. The characters can die, they can come back, they can travel, they can shift settings in an instant, and that freedom keeps the project open to collaboration and to narrative moves that do not fit a standard rock band template. Hewlett draws the world, Albarn scores it, and the songs carry ideas that would land heavier coming from a standard band.
Because Albarn and Hewlett have always treated Gorillaz as a moving canvas, the project can also take in new places and new voices without losing its shape. The Mountain brings Indian musicians and instrumentation into the record as structure, not decoration. You hear it in the percussion placement, in the way certain melodies circle and return, in how the arrangements make room for sitar, bansuri, tabla, sarod, and choirs without turning them into background color. The collaborations matter for the same reason they always do with Gorillaz, guests are part of the writing, not a bonus feature, and this album uses those voices to widen the emotional range. Anoushka Shankar, Ajay Prasanna, Asha Bhosle, Omar Souleyman, Yasiin Bey, Black Thought, IDLES, Sparks, Johnny Marr, Trueno, and Bizarrap all play real roles, plus voices pulled from earlier Gorillaz history that land differently in the shadow of the album’s subject.
Back in 2023, when I wrote about Gorillaz last album, Cracker Island, I suggested that it was their best album since Demon Days. Yet here they are two years later with an album that tops it. The Mountain feels like a step beyond. It feels made from something more personal, and you can hear it in how carefully it is built, and in the emotional weight it carries. It is Gorillaz using their art form at its highest level.
.jpeg)
0 Comments