Gorillaz - The Mountain 

With a six-month build-up and UK stadium shows on the horizon this summer, there’s a sense that Gorillaz are really going for it with ninth LP ‘The Mountain’. It may have something to do with this being the first release on their own Kong label but with remarkably sustained relevance over 25 years, it’s high cause for celebration. After dual Wembley Stadium shows with Blur back in 2023, Damon Albarn can now categorise two of his musical ventures as ‘stadium bands’.

After a run of looser themes on recent efforts, ‘The Mountain’ finds Gorillaz in full concept mode, committed with the same veracity as ‘Plastic Beach’. According to the Gorillaz story arc, the cartoon band find themselves in India gaining entry with fake passports. In our dimension, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett too travelled to India in 2024 to develop the LP (presumably using official documents) with the topic of mortality hanging heavy. Both members lost their dads in the same ten-day window very close to recording. Listed among the gargantuan credits are the ‘voices from elsewhere’ - vocal snags from collaborators who have passed. Sometimes there’s just a flavour - Dennis Hopper and Tony Allen mutter a few words - while sometimes it’s a full-blown composition, such as the fantastic ‘Delirium’.

The album’s ruminations on mortality aren’t the most natural fit for stadiums on paper - you wonder how the serene opening instrumental will go down at Tottenham Hotspur this summer. But in classic Gorillaz style, a genre switch into ‘The Moon Cave’ sets the scene sparkling with a bouncy synth bass smoothed out by buttery soulful strings and a pitch-shifted Jalen Ngonda. The group’s sporadic output still gifts Albarn licence to quantum leap styles track-to-track without prompting a double-take.

Indian instrumentation adds a new tool to Damon’s sonic arsenal. In the wrong hands, the results could be gimmicky but here the Gorillaz formula never waivers, even when 91-year-old Bollywood star Asha Bholse takes centre stage with Gruff Rhys on the spiritual electronica of ‘The Shadowy Light’. ‘Damascus’ and the aforementioned ‘Delirium’ mark a hotspot in the LP - a raga-inflected riff spiders out of control on the former while the latter is propped up by a thunderous prodding bass before striking disco strings slice up Mark E Smith’s unmistakable vocal.

Damon is well known for melancholy. The tenor of his voice coils itself so naturally around minor chords, which it does at several tender moments here like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘The Sweet Prince’. Yet the decision to mine the Eastern take on death - a much more optimistic alternative to our Western one - frequently yields joyful results. ‘The Mountain’ shows it’s a stance we could all learn from.