Astronomy holds that the larger the star, the more quickly it burns out and “dies”. Size and brilliance don’t guarantee a lasting shine. The same is often true of Earth-bound “stars” who help illuminate the world through their artistic handiwork. Some lose their physical lives sooner than expected, while others’ careers drift languidly into that oft-feared abyss of irrelevance. Such is the fickle nature of creativity and fame. However, one musician/artist/virtual quartet continue to burn just as brightly now as they did a quarter of a century ago when they first burst into incandescent existence.
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz project boasts a decades-long legacy of excellence that has never lost its freshness, even as an entire industry—indeed, an entire planet—shifted beyond it. Wars, recessions, pandemics, and administrations that have come and gone failed to displace Gorillaz‘s finger on the cultural pulse. Instead, these disconsolate tides washed new ideas into the creators’ hands.
Sourcing from his seemingly endless well of British melancholy, Albarn conceived albums like Demon Days (2005) to mirror the fractured post-modern social condition, and Plastic Beach (2010) as an examination of the consumerist decadence that now buries us under its hollow weight. On 2023’s Cracker Island, Gorillaz took on another artificially flavored movement feigning spirituality—”They taught themselves to be occult / They didn’t know its many strategies”—and a culture too preoccupied with pyrite pleasures to obtain life’s true gold.
A natural progression after surviving this shallow valley is ascending a summit far beyond it. Some believe that the higher the peak, the closer to God and Heaven. Gorillaz‘s latest collection, The Mountain, muses on the “shadowy light” death casts on life’s impermanence, and the pitfalls encountered during a spiritual quest. Ringing in with sitar strokes and elegant flutters of the bansuri, the opener and title track envelops one immediately in a hallowed wonder.
Perhaps it’s partly because of the lively animated short film threading through it and the succeeding tracks, “The Moon Cave” and “The Sad God”, that it becomes a vibrant visual experience, but “The Mountain” simmers with such gentle whimsy that one feels gripped as if by an indie fantasy story. Albarn allows Indian instrumentation its full moment here.
Exquisite follow-up “The Moon Cave” swells on filmic strings before dropping into a classic Gorillaz pop beat and Albarn’s vocals. The pivot instantly reminds listeners whose album is playing—it is not, in fact, merely a riveting sonic excursion through India—and delights through Gorillaz’s seamless marriage of disparate genres. If “The Moon Cave’s” pop elements weren’t interesting enough, the song glides into collaborator Black Thought’s rapping, augmented by interjections from De La Soul’s late David Jolicoeur. Together, “The Mountain” and “The Moon Cave” recall Demon Days‘ “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head”.
That song relates the story of a peaceful people dwelling “in harmony with the spirit of the mountain called Monkey”. Later, a horde of “Strangefolk” invades the people’s town, kills them, and steals jewels from “caves of unimaginable sincerity and beauty” hidden away in the mountain. It is in these chambers that the “good souls come to rest,” which appears to echo conceptually in “The Moon Cave”.
Things darken in “The Happy Dictator”. The satire-laced synth groover introduces an antagonist sent to intercept souls headed for the mountain. If the mountaintop symbolises a sort of transcendence, then the “one to save your soul, Amen”—who hides behind a “velvet glove” in his “world of fiction”—marks the kiss of sleep to anyone attempting to awaken. Those particularly endangered by this character are the emotionally volatile: “As the shadows, they are forming, come and join me centre stage / If you’re empty and abstracted, and your broken heart is full of rage.” The “happy dictator” promises a remedy of “no more bad news” so the protagonist’s mind can brighten, but it’s all pretend. Can one truly be free if one sinks oneself in fantasy?
In “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County”, Albarn, and by extension, Hewlett, remind listeners of the real-life emotional turmoil that informed The Mountain‘s concepts. The summer of 2024 saw both friends lose their fathers within ten days of one another. Grief birthed a collection concerning the one inevitability that comes for us all. While “The Hardest Thing” moves with slow solemnity, “Orange County”, as if processing grief in a later, less cumbersome stage, briskly moves by on a plucky beat and cheerful whistles.
Both pieces represent lovely, necessary sides of the same difficult feeling. The simplicity of Albarn’s repeated utterance, “You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love,” grounds these tracks in refreshing authenticity; Albarn resists the temptation to overintellectualise his pain or spin it into unnecessary poetry. “Orange County” offers a worry that would haunt anyone who cares to honour their dead relations: “Your legacy frightens me / Will I keep it gold? / Or will it spoil / Before I get the chance to grow old?”
Maybe death alone isn’t the hardest thing for the living. Perhaps it’s the threat that the living may dishonour the dead by mishandling their inheritance. If generational death is, in a way, a passing of the torch, then dropping the torch and extinguishing one’s family legacy risks a greater loss than mortality.
In The Mountain, Gorillaz pay homage not only to relatives but also to deceased artists who left their fingerprints on the virtual band’s creations. “Stylo” collaborator and late soul star Bobby Womack features on “The Moon Cave”, and drummer Tony Allen opens “The Hardest Thing” with a Yoruba phrase. Proof, who passed two decades ago this year, raps on the seven-minute joyride “The Manifesto”. These inclusions instill in The Mountain an earned reverence. None of it feels cheap or tacked-on, but rather like the dignifying gestures one would hope for on an album about mourning. David Jolicoeur’s feature is especially bittersweet, given De La Soul‘s involvement in Gorillaz’s longstanding greatest hit, “Feel Good Inc”.
As The Mountain progresses in a shower of sitars and sarod, marked by bold, global influences and unmistakable Gorillaz pop flourish, it asserts the virtual band’s capacity for theatricality without caricature. Here are two men well into their 50s still revelling in the childlike exhilaration of discovery, crossing cultures and offering goodwill through the lens of life’s heaviest burdens. Authoring an album of this calibre, especially in an age sensitive to cultural misinterpretation, is no easy feat. Gorillaz render the cinema of life, with its frankness and earnest-heartedness, as naturally as anything they’ve created.
Although the record falters around tracks like “Damascus” and “Casablanca”, it’s an ambitious project that significantly expands the horizon of what’s possible for Gorillaz. In paying respects to the dead, The Mountain renews the project’s lease on life. Twenty-five years ago, a star was born—and it’s shining brighter today than it has in some time.