Artist:
Gorillaz
Genre:
Pop/Rock
Alternative/Indie Rock
Total Time:
66:00
Record Label:
Kong
Purchase Album:
CD, Amazon Music, Vinyl,
Apple Music, Spotify
Release Date
February 27, 2026
Find out more about this album release after the jump.
Gorillaz
Genre:
Pop/Rock
Alternative/Indie Rock
Total Time:
66:00
Record Label:
Kong
Purchase Album:
CD, Amazon Music, Vinyl,
Apple Music, Spotify
Release Date
February 27, 2026
Find out more about this album release after the jump.
Purchasing Links
Product Description: The ninth Gorillaz album arrived a few weeks short of their debut’s 25th anniversary. In that intervening quarter of a century, lives have been lived. The Mountain is a record that, like Damon Albarn’s 2021 solo album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, explores loss and transformation, themes you become more sensitive to the older you get. While there aren’t huge signs of wear and tear on the faces of the animations that front Gorillaz, Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the band’s core creative duo, are well into their fifties and, in the summer of 2024, both lost their fathers while working on The Mountain. “It contains grief,” Albarn tells Apple Music Radio’s Matt Wilkinson. “It’s personal, but it’s supposed to be for everyone. You know: May contain grief-stricken lyrics.”
Part of Albarn’s grieving process was to scatter his father’s ashes in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges in northern India. Hewlett had also spent a good deal of time in the country during 2022 and 2023, helping look after his mother-in-law who had suffered a stroke in the Rajasthan capital, Jaipur. Confronting mortality in a different land, they both found inspiration for the record. “Visually, it’s mind-blowing what’s going on,” says Hewlett. “There’s hundreds of years of history still evident on the street. There’ll be a guy galloping down the street on a white horse dressed in a costume from 500 years ago. Or there’s a funeral pyre or there’s a wedding ceremony. And then you’re in traffic in a tuk-tuk and there’s every car ever made and cows and horses and mules and dogs and then an elephant. If you’re an artist or a musician or anybody creative and you go to India and it doesn’t fry your mind, then clearly you’re not a creative person. It’s all there. Everything is right in front of you. And you come back full. Your mind’s just full of stuff.”
The influence is most immediately felt in the sound of an album that was partly recorded in a number of locations across India. As ever, the music draws from, and mutates, multiple genres and, here, it’s regularly infused with the instrumentation and rhythms of Indian classical musicians including Anoushka Shankar, Ajay Prasanna, Amaan Ali Bangash, and Ayaan Ali Bangash. It was also the local attitudes towards death—a vibrant contrast to the solemnity of grief in the UK—that impacted the pair. “What’s interesting is: Why is that?” says Albarn. “It’s not because we don’t have the capacity to open our minds to the ideas that you find in abundance in places like India. But it’s not the only place that has an interesting relationship with death. Go to Mexico. You go to Ghana—[going] anywhere where there’s some kind of color and joy is a good way to counterbalance all the grimness. And we seem to pile the grimness on. So not only is it a crematorium, but it’s a grey sky and it’s cold.”
On The Mountain, death inspires warm expressions of love: “The Sweet Prince” places Albarn at his father’s bedside “looking out across the void” during his final hours and celebrating his life and character as he waves him on his “patterned path into the next life.” And there’s hope about transference as Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle sings of a journey to the next life on “The Shadowy Light” amid bubbling synth-pop buoyed by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys declaring, “I shed, I shed my skin/The end is the beginning.”
During “The Hardest Thing,” Albarn is at his most elegiac. So often on Gorillaz records, his voice is warped and muddied, like thoughts spilling from an answer-machine recording—is it Albarn himself or the animated 2D calling? On this song though, his vocal is untouched and vulnerable as he absorbs the shattering pain of loss with the line “The hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love.” Yet on the next song, “Orange County,” that very refrain becomes part of something more optimistic and spry, decorated by a chipper whistle and Shankar’s sitar. “It’s the same song,” says Albarn. “It’s slightly like if you’re in one room, you feel something in you. You go into another one and it’s got the right lighting and it smells right. It’s a different room, although it may be exactly the same space. They’re different sides of a coin, my philosophical coin.”
That subject matter also encouraged Gorillaz to return to unused recordings they’d made with collaborators who have since passed away. “We put in collages of, photographs of, and memories of other people we’ve had the privilege to know and work with over the years,” says Albarn. Afrobeat legend Tony Allen gently says, “Oya, e dide erori” (Yoruba for “Oh, wake up my dear”) on “The Hardest Thing.” Mark E. Smith comes bowling and bellowing through the celestial calm of “Delirium,” and this life dovetails with the next on “The Moon Cave,” which carries the voice of Bobby Womack and also features The Roots’ Black Thought swapping bars with the late Dave Jolicoeur of De La Soul. “They were very good friends for a long time,” says Hewlett. “They came in and [Black Thought] had a conversation with his friend, who’s somewhere else.”
As personal as The Mountain feels during these moments, it’s also a record with an eye on today’s wider world. On the doomy dub of “The God of Lying,” IDLES’ Joe Talbot recommends questioning everything, Sparks appear as autocratic rulers on “The Happy Dictator” and the Johnny Marr-assisted “The Plastic Guru” contemplates how belief and truth can be manipulated. It’s all part of an album where Gorillaz sound revitalized—as curious, adventurous, thoughtful, and cohesive as they’ve ever been. The end is a beginning. “We had a great adventure,” says Hewlett. “It reminded us that in order to make something really good, you have to go somewhere you’ve never been or have an experience you’ve never had, not just be in the studio in LA or London or wherever. India was the place this time. It gave us a lot.”
Part of Albarn’s grieving process was to scatter his father’s ashes in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges in northern India. Hewlett had also spent a good deal of time in the country during 2022 and 2023, helping look after his mother-in-law who had suffered a stroke in the Rajasthan capital, Jaipur. Confronting mortality in a different land, they both found inspiration for the record. “Visually, it’s mind-blowing what’s going on,” says Hewlett. “There’s hundreds of years of history still evident on the street. There’ll be a guy galloping down the street on a white horse dressed in a costume from 500 years ago. Or there’s a funeral pyre or there’s a wedding ceremony. And then you’re in traffic in a tuk-tuk and there’s every car ever made and cows and horses and mules and dogs and then an elephant. If you’re an artist or a musician or anybody creative and you go to India and it doesn’t fry your mind, then clearly you’re not a creative person. It’s all there. Everything is right in front of you. And you come back full. Your mind’s just full of stuff.”
The influence is most immediately felt in the sound of an album that was partly recorded in a number of locations across India. As ever, the music draws from, and mutates, multiple genres and, here, it’s regularly infused with the instrumentation and rhythms of Indian classical musicians including Anoushka Shankar, Ajay Prasanna, Amaan Ali Bangash, and Ayaan Ali Bangash. It was also the local attitudes towards death—a vibrant contrast to the solemnity of grief in the UK—that impacted the pair. “What’s interesting is: Why is that?” says Albarn. “It’s not because we don’t have the capacity to open our minds to the ideas that you find in abundance in places like India. But it’s not the only place that has an interesting relationship with death. Go to Mexico. You go to Ghana—[going] anywhere where there’s some kind of color and joy is a good way to counterbalance all the grimness. And we seem to pile the grimness on. So not only is it a crematorium, but it’s a grey sky and it’s cold.”
On The Mountain, death inspires warm expressions of love: “The Sweet Prince” places Albarn at his father’s bedside “looking out across the void” during his final hours and celebrating his life and character as he waves him on his “patterned path into the next life.” And there’s hope about transference as Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle sings of a journey to the next life on “The Shadowy Light” amid bubbling synth-pop buoyed by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys declaring, “I shed, I shed my skin/The end is the beginning.”
During “The Hardest Thing,” Albarn is at his most elegiac. So often on Gorillaz records, his voice is warped and muddied, like thoughts spilling from an answer-machine recording—is it Albarn himself or the animated 2D calling? On this song though, his vocal is untouched and vulnerable as he absorbs the shattering pain of loss with the line “The hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love.” Yet on the next song, “Orange County,” that very refrain becomes part of something more optimistic and spry, decorated by a chipper whistle and Shankar’s sitar. “It’s the same song,” says Albarn. “It’s slightly like if you’re in one room, you feel something in you. You go into another one and it’s got the right lighting and it smells right. It’s a different room, although it may be exactly the same space. They’re different sides of a coin, my philosophical coin.”
That subject matter also encouraged Gorillaz to return to unused recordings they’d made with collaborators who have since passed away. “We put in collages of, photographs of, and memories of other people we’ve had the privilege to know and work with over the years,” says Albarn. Afrobeat legend Tony Allen gently says, “Oya, e dide erori” (Yoruba for “Oh, wake up my dear”) on “The Hardest Thing.” Mark E. Smith comes bowling and bellowing through the celestial calm of “Delirium,” and this life dovetails with the next on “The Moon Cave,” which carries the voice of Bobby Womack and also features The Roots’ Black Thought swapping bars with the late Dave Jolicoeur of De La Soul. “They were very good friends for a long time,” says Hewlett. “They came in and [Black Thought] had a conversation with his friend, who’s somewhere else.”
As personal as The Mountain feels during these moments, it’s also a record with an eye on today’s wider world. On the doomy dub of “The God of Lying,” IDLES’ Joe Talbot recommends questioning everything, Sparks appear as autocratic rulers on “The Happy Dictator” and the Johnny Marr-assisted “The Plastic Guru” contemplates how belief and truth can be manipulated. It’s all part of an album where Gorillaz sound revitalized—as curious, adventurous, thoughtful, and cohesive as they’ve ever been. The end is a beginning. “We had a great adventure,” says Hewlett. “It reminded us that in order to make something really good, you have to go somewhere you’ve never been or have an experience you’ve never had, not just be in the studio in LA or London or wherever. India was the place this time. It gave us a lot.”
TRACK LIST:
1 . The Mountain (Feat. Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)
2 . The Moon Cave (Feat. Asha Puthli, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Jalen Ngonda and Black Thought)
3 . The Happy Dictator (Feat. Sparks)
4 . The Hardest Thing (Feat. Tony Allen)
5 . Orange County (Feat. Bizarrap, Kara Jackson and Anoushka Shankar)
6 . The God of Lying (Feat. Idles)
7 . The Empty Dream Machine (Feat. Black Thought, Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
8 . The Manifesto (Feat. Trueno and Proof)
9 . The Plastic Guru (Feat. Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
10 . Delirium (Feat. Mark E. Smith)
11 . Damascus (Feat. Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey)
12 . The Shadowy Light (Feat. Asha Bhosle, Gruff Rhys, Ajay Prasanna, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)
13 . Casablanca (Feat. Paul Simonon and Johnny Marr)
14 . The Sweet Prince (Feat. Ajay Prasanna, Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
15 . The Sad God (Feat. Black Thought, Ajay Prasanna and Anoushka Shankar)
2 . The Moon Cave (Feat. Asha Puthli, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Jalen Ngonda and Black Thought)
3 . The Happy Dictator (Feat. Sparks)
4 . The Hardest Thing (Feat. Tony Allen)
5 . Orange County (Feat. Bizarrap, Kara Jackson and Anoushka Shankar)
6 . The God of Lying (Feat. Idles)
7 . The Empty Dream Machine (Feat. Black Thought, Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
8 . The Manifesto (Feat. Trueno and Proof)
9 . The Plastic Guru (Feat. Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
10 . Delirium (Feat. Mark E. Smith)
11 . Damascus (Feat. Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey)
12 . The Shadowy Light (Feat. Asha Bhosle, Gruff Rhys, Ajay Prasanna, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)
13 . Casablanca (Feat. Paul Simonon and Johnny Marr)
14 . The Sweet Prince (Feat. Ajay Prasanna, Johnny Marr and Anoushka Shankar)
15 . The Sad God (Feat. Black Thought, Ajay Prasanna and Anoushka Shankar)
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