Following the release of their seventh album, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, Gorillaz has joined forces with Beck to perform virtually on Animal Crossing.
The artists took part in an in-game talk show last week, where they performed their new collaboration, “The Valley Of The Pagans”, which appears on Song Machine. Gorillaz creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett also sat down for an interview, where they spoke about creating a virtual band. “They’re an entity, they don’t belong to anything really previous to them. We started it and it was such a strange idea, like ‘I’ll make a tune and you draw a picture, and that will be the band’,” said Albarn.
Albarn also spoke about collaborating with Elton John on the track “The Pink Phantom”: “When I was seven, I got picked up outside my primary school in Elton John’s pink Bentley Phantom 5. It was his percussionist driving, Ray Cooper, who happened to be a family friend, and the reason he had this amazing car was because Elton John’s band had gone on tour earlier in the year in what was the Soviet Union. He’d not been paid in money, but in coal and logs, and he was finding it hard to get the money back. He didn’t have money to pay his musicians so he paid them in gifts. I told Jamie this story and he said, ‘you have to contact Elton and write a song’.”
Released last week, Song Machine also features appearances by Kano, Octavian, slowthai, St Vincent, and JPEGMAFIA, among others.
Earlier this month, virtual band members Murdoc, 2D, and Russel spoke to Dazed about creating the music video for “The Pink Phantom”. They’re also hosting a new Apple Music radio show, titled Song Machine Radio, with each member hosting their own one-hour episode.
Watch the virtual performance below.
