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. Their experiences with loss and their time in India became the starting point for their new album, The Mountain.
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, come back, travel, and shift settings in an instant, giving Albarn and Hewlett the freedom to continually reinvent the world around the music. That freedom has also made collaboration a central part of Gorillaz from the beginning.
Because Albarn and Hewlett have always treated Gorillaz as a moving canvas, the project can also take in new places and new voices. The Mountain brings Indian musicians and instrumentation into the record with arrangements that make room for sitar, bansuri, tabla, sarod, and choirs. 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 Albums 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. For all of the guests, sounds, and ideas packed into it, what stays with me most is how personal it feels. This is Gorillaz at their artistic best.
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