(Kong)
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band mark 25 years with an album inspired by India and shaped by loss, featuring collaborators living and dead
It is 25 years since Gorillaz released their eponymous debut album. A project you might reasonably have assumed was a jokey one-off on the part of a Britpop star has instead lasted a quarter of a century, long enough for Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s concept of a “virtual group” to seem less like a snarky gag at the expense of manufactured pop than oddly commonplace: their latest release is launched into a world where cartoon K-pop bands Huntr/x and Saja Boys have collectively spent 100 weeks and counting on the UK singles chart, where the anime “vocaloid” Hatsune Miku is playing the O2 Arena and where celebrated producer Timbaland has launched an AI-generated singer called Tata Taktumi. Meanwhile, Gorillaz’s oeuvre has sprawled to nine albums, involving something like 100 guest artists; they are the thread that links Carly Simon to Shaun Ryder, Skepta to Lou Reed and Bad Bunny to Mark E Smith.
Perhaps inevitably, marshalling so many eclectic contributors has proved a challenge, even for someone as undoubtedly talented as Damon Albarn. Gorillaz albums are seldom concise affairs and are of variable quality, thus tricky to navigate. The best ones are those unified by a strong underlying concept, as on Demon Days’ glum survey of “the world in a state of night” post-9/11, or the ecological satire of 2010’s Plastic Beach.
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