‘The unknown is exciting’: Why Gorillaz’ upcoming album is all about death

25 years ago, in the year 2000, Dazed travelled to Gorillaz HQ in west London for their first ever interview. Virtual or not, the band were vividly alive: lead singer 2D puking on the streets of Notting Hill, bassist Murdoc collapsing on top of Robbie Williams, all of them allegedly “sniffing sulphate” off a King Tubby CD. They were as raucous as any other band of their time. But life, it seems, catches up even with virtual characters. Returning to meet the group a quarter of a century later, the conversation was slightly heavier: their upcoming ninth studio album, The Mountain, it transpired, was all about death. 

An air of mysticism surrounds Gorillaz’ west London studio today. Field recordings from the group’s recent trip to India play on loop – distant chanting, fireworks, ambient chatter – while comic book artist and one-half of the band’s corporeal form, Jamie Hewlett, blows smoke from a Dunhill cigarette out of a window. “Reincarnation is a fantastic way to start the day, philosophically,” he muses. “You don’t know what part of the multiverse you’ll come back in; the unknown is what’s exciting.” The group’s other musical half, Damon Albarn, chimes in, cryptically: “The unknown, the spiritual.” It starts to feel like they know something the rest of us don’t.

This latest adventure all started with what Hewlett describes as a “hat trick of death.” First, Hewlett’s mother-in-law suffered a stroke while travelling in India in 2022, prompting him to fly out to Jaipur at a moment’s notice. “I spent two months with my wife dealing with something very traumatic,” he recalls. “It should’ve been that I never wanted to go back to India again, but, really, I fell in love with Jaipur. I thought, ‘I have to go back with Damon’.” A year later, as the duo were preparing to head out on their second trip to India, Albarn’s father suddenly passed away, followed by Hewlett’s own father just ten days later. In this shared tragedy, the theme of Gorillaz’ next album began to take hold.

“Death from a western perspective is all so depressing, but in India it’s quite positive,” Hewlett explains. “When I was visiting my mother-in-law, I witnessed a lot of people in tears about the fact that a family member was going to pass away, but it was also crossed with celebration about the fact that they were coming back, that their journey begins again. I thought, if we could transmit that message through a Gorillaz album, wouldn’t that be a nice gift?” Albarn concurs: “After Plastic Beach, we drifted apart. This is the first thing that has got us to meditate on what we’re doing together since.” 

This big question – the biggest question, in fact – looms over the entirety of The Mountain. The tracks are adorned with posthumous contributions from across the Gorillaz musical multiverse: D12 rapper Proof, De La Soul’s David Jolicoeur, Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and many more – sonically manifesting the central message that death is not the end. Elegiac track “My Sweet Prince”, meanwhile, depicts Albarn witnessing his father’s final moments in hospital, inverting a western symbol of infirmity – the syringe – into a sword whose “mighty blow will set [him] on [his] patterned path into the next life.” 

Sonically, the project is equally as ambitious, whether it’s Argentinian rap legend Trueno going back-to-back with the late Proof over tabla and sitar-infused production, or Yasiin Bey (FKA. Mos Def) engaging in an interlinguistic call-and-response with Syrian dabke revivalist Omar Souleyman. It’s a near-death DMT trip in scope, guided by the sepia-toned aphorisms of virtual frontman 2D – perhaps Gorillaz’ only enduring trait across the last 25 years. 

Below, as Gorillaz continue their journey up The Mountain with their latest single, “Damascus”, released today, Dazed are granted the first look into the band’s new spiritual era.

What’s the symbolism of The Mountain, then? On the cover, it looks like they’ve reached the top.

Hewlett: The Mountain is a metaphor for the journey of life. [Visually] it just feels like a breath of fresh air above the madness of life. 

Albarn: It doesn’t say that that is the ultimate peak. We don’t know that there aren’t other peaks. 

Hewlett: Earlier, for instance, on Plastic Beach, Damon called me and he had just been swimming in Devon. He said he was disturbed by the amount of plastic that was on the beach, and he told me, ‘I want to call the album Plastic Beach’. We hadn’t even talked about the theme or anything, he just said those two words and that was everything. Then, when we came back from the first trip to India, the first track Damon sent me was just called ‘The Mountain’, and that suddenly filled in all the blanks that were missing for me in terms of a story and a narrative. 

What are the chances that both of you went through such a similar traumatic experience at the same time? 

Damon: Well, it’s quite high when you think about it…

Hewlett: We’re both born ten days apart. So, when [Damon] finally shuffles off this mortal path, I’ll only have ten days left! But also, taking the Gorillaz into that sort of world was an exciting challenge. There’s a lot of playfulness and sarcasm in those characters and what you can do with the music, so it was like, how do I retain that and also make sense of these experiences? We had this really fucking amazing adventure. We went to the ashram with the ‘Plastic Guru’ – all of the tracks are real stories. 

Albarn: That’s the lovely thing about Gorillaz – it’s still committed to everything existing in its own world. It’s why I put that sound on my voice to separate me from [cartoon lead singer] 2-D. He… Well, I actually don’t think he’s much of a he, he’s more of a ‘they’, isn’t he?

Hewlett: They’re definitely more at home in that [non-binary] world. They’re a sweetheart, they’re open and accepting new information. 

Albarn: Exactly, it’s such a nice place to sing from. 

Can you tell me about the contributors on the new record? A lot of them aren’t here anymore, are they? 

Hewlett: This was Damon’s wonderful idea right at the beginning about including all of the people we have worked with over the years who have passed away.  

Albarn: I just opened up the files of everything we had. It was really important that it wasn’t stuff that’s repeated. Some of the sessions come from times when the engineers were very tidy, so you’re only really left with what was on the record. Some left bits and bobs in, like Proof. 

Hewlett: I didn’t know they did that, engineers, they clean up. That’s outrageous! That’s like getting rid of sketches by a great artist.

Albarn: Yeah, no more cleaning up sessions. Everything must be kept. Michael Nyman taught me that: you never waste a note.

The imagery is also very striking. 

Hewlett: With India, everywhere you look, something is going on. Every square inch of space is taken up with madness and beauty and craziness. We took a photographer with us, and I just got her to photograph everything, because trying to draw those backgrounds would have taken me forever. So I drew the characters into that world, and did a lot of collaging. I think, if you’re an artist or in any way visually inclined, and you’re not inspired by India…  

Albarn: I mean, that inevitably connected with me too. When I was a kid, my parents played me a lot of classical Indian music. I listened to more classical Indian music than I did the Beatles. When my dad was dying, I put on [Ravi Shankar’s] ‘Morning Raga’ in his hospital room, and he came back to life again for literally 20 minutes. Musically, India is extraordinary. It’s a cacophonous place, which is always good to make a record.

The last album was very story-heavy, so [The Mountain] was a departure from that. You can’t really tell anybody about these themes. You just try to capture it in the music, in the artwork.

Earlier, you mentioned “The Plastic Guru”. What’s the story behind that?

Hewlett: That one’s a classic. So, we went to an ashram in Rishikesh… 

Albarn: You’ve got to understand, Rishikesh is where the Beatles went to their ashram and there is a whole tourist culture based around visiting there, which we didn’t want to do. 

Hewlett: No disrespect, but that’s their story; we wanted our own. So, we ended up with this guru, but we soon realised that someone had done an internet search before we arrived… He made a beeline for Damon when we got there. He took Damon’s hand and looked deep into his eyes, and they began a staring competition which went on for way too long. Damon didn’t break his gaze at all and, at one point, the guru closed his eyes because he couldn't continue it anymore, and then he opened one eye to see if Damon was still staring! 

They insisted that, when they did their ceremony on the banks of the Ganges, we sat next to the guru and his wife. Damon managed to slip back out of sight, and that was when we realised it was being televised across India to a lot of people. All I could see was my fucking stupid face on the TV screen with all these people singing! It’s definitely on the internet somewhere. That was the only one, of all the beautiful experiences in India, that I felt a little bit jaded by.

So, we know about why you both ended up in India. But what about the Gorillaz in-universe? The end of the last album saw the band fleeing to India, right? 

Hewlett: Yes, that’s from the last campaign. Cracker Island had a very complicated storyline because we were working on a movie with Netflix that we pulled out of at the last minute. They move incredibly slow, so we kind of wrote our own movie, which became [Cracker Island]. It ended with them escaping India because, when we were finishing the album, I was in India with my wife’s mother and I thought, ‘Maybe we’ll do something here…’

The last album was very story-heavy, so [The Mountain] was a departure from that. You can’t really tell anybody about these themes. You just try to capture it in the music, in the artwork. Their journeys are our journeys. They’ve changed with us. Animated characters are not supposed to change the way they look, but that’s like Damon making the same style of record as 25 years ago. It’s just not possible.

“Damascus (feat. Omar Souleyman and Yassin Bey)”, the fourth single from Gorillaz’ upcoming ninth album The Mountain, is out now. The Mountain releases February 27 on Gorillaz’ new record label, KONG.