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Gorillaz – The Mountain – 27/02/26

“You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love”

Last year, Gorillaz were on the nostalgia treadmill. For their silver anniversary, they reminisced on their visual history with the brilliant House Of Kong exhibition. This was located just behind the Copper Box Arena where they performed a residency consisting of their first three albums, plus a secret set (which turned out to be a full rendition of The Mountain). Not long after, they relaunched their interactive website, a significant pillar of Gorillaz’ early days. It was perhaps the most backwards-looking Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett had been since their virtual band began, a project renowned for their use of new technologies and eclectic mix of genre.

Since returning from their hiatus with 2017’s Humanz, Gorillaz has slowly morphed into what’s sometimes felt like an overstuffed smorgasbord of big-name collaborators, serving less as musical catalysts and more as platinum namechecks ticked off the list: just listen to ‘Oil’ from Cracker Island and tell me Stevie Nicks is integral to that song. There is still plenty of quality there, but the tightness of their early concepts has loosened into the occasional visualiser, edging ever closer to shallow fanfiction.

With The Mountain, Albarn reestablishes himself as a steady hand on the tiller. The title track is a sweeping woodwind-led instrumental, the longest a Gorillaz album has taken to get to any words. It sets the scene beautifully, laying out the LP’s Hindu influence through the interplay between classical flautist Ajay Prasanna and Grammy-nominated sitarist Anoushka Shankar. When we do get to the lead vocal, Dennis Hopper’s deep-set growls echo through time and space, ‘the mountain’ warbling in each ear. These words come from the Demon Days track ‘Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey’s Head’, a tale of spirituality and innocence being mined and manipulated to nefarious ends. ‘Darkness’ is Hopper’s final word, stalwart and gruesome in the centre of the mix.

The album trawls the expanse of human experience, dragging up all manner of vulnerabilities. For tracks like ‘The Happy Dictator’ (befittingly featuring Sparks considering ‘Kiss Me, Son Of God’), ‘The God of Lying’ and ‘Delirium’, Albarn slips into satire, at times with a bubblegum cynicism, at others with a more recognisable menace.

However, the album’s peaks are in its sincerest moments. Black Thought’s verse on ‘The Empty Dream Machine’ might be The Mountain’s best, touching on race, ambition, tragedy and inspiration with a brutal clarity. The closing track, ‘The Sad God’, is devastating in its bluntness, a deity, tired of being disappointed, singing their final lullaby. And yet, each track fills you with a hope and optimism, a burning, desperate need for something better. The beauty of the arrangements, the instrumentation, everything – it reminds you to be alive.

The Mountain may well be Albarn and Hewlett’s most personal project to date, coming after both suffered intense loss. Amidst the cartoon cults and sonic experimentation, sometimes reality does cut through. On an album brimming with collaborators new and old, posthumous and present, singing in five languages, Damon Albarn’s grief is most striking: “You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love”.

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