Twenty-five years into their journey of cross-genre mischief, Gorillaz have delivered a record that feels like both a culmination and a reset. It is their most daring work since Plastic Beach, yet somehow more intimate than anything else in their catalogue. Their ninth album, The Mountain, sprawls across styles and moods, an album shadowed by loss rather than spectacle. In the space of ten days, both Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett lost their fathers, and out of that shared rupture, they have fashioned a record that plays like a digital séance and, at the same time, a surprisingly warm record for a band built on artifice.
Where earlier concept albums like Demon Days or Plastic Beach often looked outward at a collapsing world, The Mountain turns inward. It feels less like social commentary and more like a guided descent through private grief. After scattering his father’s ashes in the Ganges, Albarn abandoned the Western instinct for solitary mourning in favour of the communal rituals and expansive vision of Hindu philosophy. That shift in worldview sits at the very core of the album. Anoushka Shankar’s presence is not just another guest spot; her sitar becomes a kind of spiritual conduit, a bright, vibrating thread that leads back to Albarn’s father and his lifelong love of Ravi Shankar’s music. This sense of lineage and remembrance binds the record together, so even as the songs hop from New Delhi night streets to New York high-rises, the album still feels like a single, vivid dream that you never quite wake up from.
Musically, Albarn has recovered the scrappy, slightly oddball energy that first made Gorillaz feel like outsiders who snuck into the mainstream. He plays and sings nearly everything alongside Remi Kabaka Jr., giving the record an almost homemade intimacy, even when the arrangements swell. The guest list is as unpredictable as ever, but here the collaborators are like figures drifting through a shared, imagined afterlife. Voices from beyond, including posthumous appearances from Mark E. Smith, Tony Allen, and De La Soul’s David Jolicoeur, are treated with tenderness and curiosity rather than morbid spectacle.
“Delirium” is one of the record’s boldest swings. It lifts a typically caustic Mark E. Smith vocal tirade and wraps it in feverish disco strings and pounding rhythms, transforming what could have been a museum piece into something nervy and alive. “The Shadowy Light” pairs Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle with Gruff Rhys over glowing, trance-like electronics, and the result is a prayer hovering above the mix. The track has a strange lightness, as if gravity has been turned down just a little.
The Mountain still makes room for earthly concerns. “The Happy Dictator” (featuring Sparks) is a barbed, hyper-melodic pop song that pokes at modern strongmen and their cults of personality, proof that Albarn’s political instincts have not dulled. “The God of Lying,” powered by IDLES’ blunt-force energy, clearly nods to the lurching swing of “Clint Eastwood.” The resemblance occasionally distracts, but the song’s venom and nervous humour keep it from feeling like a retread. It is a small misstep on an album that otherwise climbs relentlessly higher.
Elsewhere, the record moves with surprising grace between moods. “The Moon Cave” glides on supple, elastic funk, full of small instrumental details that make it feel quietly luxurious. “The Hardest Thing/Orange County” is steeped in aching, almost embarrassed vulnerability, its melodies glimmering through layers of synths and soft beats. The album constantly shifts between tenderness and abrasion, between confession and spectacle, yet it does so with the care of someone building a fragile structure by hand, knowing that any careless move might topple the whole thing.
By the time the final waltz of “The Sad God” ebbs away, The Mountain has revealed itself as something more than another entry in a long-running project. It feels like a manual for turning private sorrow into shared understanding, a study in how grief can deepen rather than narrow a creative voice. Albarn and Hewlett show that, even after a quarter-century, the world’s most famous virtual band can still find new ways to sound vulnerable and urgently alive. It is a record that sits with loss and then gently nudges you back toward the world, asking you to listen a little more closely to the living.
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