In TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.
In TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.
Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism of Damon Albarn – always singing, in this context, through effects, as if he’s making an emergency phone call from the wreckage of some digital shanty-town.
Over the last decade, however, things had broken down between Hewlett and Albarn, and there seemed something a little formulaic about the last few Gorillaz albums: they served up some decent slices of global pop with some marquee names, but without much synergy between the artwork and the music, and no grand concepts of the kind that united 2010’s Plastic Beach.
After 2023’s Cracker Island, Albarn suggested that Gorillaz were in need of “a paradigm shift”, and their ninth studio album provides that. Instead of a series of discrete, bite-sized TV shows, The Mountain is an epic, banquet-sized movie.
It retains the musical universe familiar from previous Gorillaz albums – American singers, Latino rappers, English pop eccentrics, African and Middle Eastern multi-instrumentalists – but the setting here shifts to India. A recurring cast of Hindustani classical musicians provide much of the background, while the lyrics are inspired by Hindu notions of Samsara and the life cycle, dominated by themes of death and rebirth.
Part of the reason why Albarn and Hewlett are once again tight and simpatico is because they were united by grief after a triptych of deaths: Hewlett’s mother-in-law’s death in 2023 was followed by his father’s death in 2024, just 10 days after Albarn lost his own father.
Albarn senior, incidentally, had a life that was almost as interesting as his son’s: an inspirational art course leader, whose students included Adam Ant, Malcolm McLaren, Peter Greenaway and Ian Dury, he briefly managed Soft Machine and curated dozens of art exhibitions and “happenings” around Swinging London.
Like many 1960s counterculturalists, he also had a long-term obsession with Indian music and culture, which feeds into this album. Several tracks even serve as eulogies for him. “Your legacy frightens me,” we hear on “Orange County”, while “The Sweet Prince” seems to narrate Keith Albarn’s last moments. “Sweet prince, don’t be sad/You were never meant to be here”, Damon sings over Anoushka Shankar’s tumbling sitar flourishes and Johnny Marr’s jangling guitar. Here the syringe that administers palliative painkilling injections becomes a sword which “will set you on your patterned path into the next life”.
In keeping with the spirit of death and resurrection, Albarn has also mined his archive to find unused vocal snippets from now-deceased Gorillaz guest singers.
In this world, death is not the end. Bobby Womack’s soulful croon and Dave Jolicoeur’s abstract couplets are reanimated for “The Moon Cave”; Mark E Smith’s glorious gibberish about “peg-legged slave traders” and “shrunken China heads” serves as the chorus to “Delirium”; Tony Allen intoning “we are ready” in Yoruba introduces “The Hardest Thing”; while Dennis Hopper’s distinctive raspy tone provides the name of the LP. Proof, a rapper from Eminem’s Detroit collective D12, was shot dead in 2006, but his contribution to “The Manifesto”, recorded 25 years ago, sees him almost narrating his own murder. “Beefing with your blocks/That you’re creeping with your Glock/Now you’re sleeping in a box”, he declaims, over a woozy, Dilla-style waltz and some drunken funereal horns.
Even the newly recorded guest vocalists concentrate on themes of mortality. Sharing bars with Proof on “The Manifesto” is the 23-year-old Argentine rapper Trueno – he’s rapping in Spanish but his verse, translated in the sleevenotes, is an astonishingly poetic invocation of the life cycle (“I crossed the threshold and today I feel free… only my feats, my virtue and my feeling accompany me/To live chapter two of this tale”). Gruff Rhys ends “The Shadowy Light” with the lines “I shed my skin/The end is the beginning”; Black Thought from The Roots sprays out several verbose rhymes throughout, ruminating on the final track that: “Even if they let me into Heaven I would probably just move back soon”.
But the sonic signature of The Mountain remains the core group of classical Indian musicians – sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, bansuri flautist Ajay Prasanna, tabla player Viraj Acharya and sarod-playing brothers Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash – as well the nine-piece Mountain Choir.
Even the most English-sounding track here – the drunken, clanking, Jerry Dammers-inspired ska of “The God Of Lying”, featuring a deadpan vocal by Joe Talbot from Idles – comes wreathed in tablas and bansuri flute, like a Bollywood take on “Clint Eastwood” from the first Gorillaz album.
The ecstatic Arabic blip-hop of “Damascus” sees Syrian singer Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey (the artist formerly known as Mos Def) trading verses over the pulsating percussion of Viraj Acharya. “The Manifesto” started off with a simple Latin preset on one of Albarn’s vintage home organs and it would have worked perfectly if set to a dembow-style reggaeton beat, but it piles on so many Indian rhythms that it morphs – quite brilliantly – into a piece of heavy bhangra.
And the pulsating synth pop of “The Shadowy Light” is transformed by Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle, now aged 92, with a lyric that sees her welcoming the process of death (“come, oh boatman, lower my boat into still waters/And take me, finally, to the other side”, she trills, in Hindi).
Just as this threatens to look like gap-year fetishisation of brown spirituality, the Kraftwerkian “The Plastic Guru” serves as a welcome rejoinder – an account of Albarn and Hewlett’s Beatles-like visit to an ashram in Rishikesh, where they quickly grew suspicious of their assigned swami (“starring in your own show and selling your snake oil”).
Bleepy analogue synths and a jabbering four-to-the-bar piano are slowly drenched in multi-tracked sitars and the massed ranks of an Indian ceremonial band, as if to desperately assert the guru’s credentials. False idols also dominate the infectiously catchy “The Happy Dictator”, where Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks invoke the spirit of insane autocrats, like Kim Il-sung, whose rule is eternal, even after their death.
Albarn has, of course, explored grief on many occasions – Gorillaz’s “Andromeda”, Blur’s “The Ballad” and the title track to his solo album The Nearer The Fountain… are all mournful elegies to departed friends and loved ones; countless other Blur and Gorillaz songs mourn the death of relationships. You would expect an entire album with death at its central theme to be similarly hymnal, sombre and funereal, but The Mountain somehow manages to be none of these things. Its 15 tracks are filled with cheery major-key singalongs, sitar-soaked synth-pop bangers and whimsical waltzes that serve as ecstatic celebrations of life, rebirth and reinvention.
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