On The Mountain, Gorillaz Turn Grief and Global Collaboration into Their Most Ambitious Album Yet

It's evening in London and Damon Albarn is lying about how many drinks he's had.

"One Negroni," he teases, seated in front of a bit more than one empty glass. There's also a luxurious looking plate of cake, purportedly "stolen" earlier in the evening but unlikely to be missed. Rock star's prerogative.

Jamie Hewlett chimes in: "He's so looked after, that Damon."

The co-founders of Gorillaz have hopped on video to talk The Mountain, a sprawling new concept album that tackles life, mortality, and what it means to be human. It all started with a death in India.

"I got back from India in January, 2023, and I saw Damon," Hewlett explains. "Damon was doing Blur."

"I think they were doing me, actually," Albarn says.

The pair have a practiced rhythm, a warm and welcoming energy that makes them sought-after collaborators the world over. Hewlett lays out the emotional stakes as well as the lore of virtual characters 2-D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel. Albarn relaxes just outside the brightest glow of the spotlight, happy to take center stage if called upon, but also content to crack jokes and enjoy someone else's cake.

For 25 years, Gorillaz have managed a thoroughly modern marvel. Community grows into cross-platform community, fandoms spilling across arena audiences, art communities,  multi-part video breakdowns, and lengthy message board threads. Acts as diverse as Twenty One Pilots and Ghost adopted their world-building strategies, and crypto speculators ripped off their artwork to win and lose millions. Gorillaz endure.

As Hewlett tells it, his "mother-in-law got sick and was in a coma in Jaipur. I spent eight weeks with my wife trying to get her home. She didn't make it, unfortunately. But even though it was dealing with a very difficult subject, I also fell in love with Jaipur. I said to Damon, we need to go to India together."

The first songwriting trip to India was, according to Albarn, "a joy, a wonder, a remarkably diarrhea-free experience." Gorillaz collaborated with local musicians in a grand, improvised exchange. "It's such a bloody important thing in the world," Albarn continues, "to be able to embrace the idea of we all live on the same planet together and therefore we are all equal. You have everything to benefit from going to other places. You don't know everything yet. However omnipotent you see yourself as being, find a little bit more to learn."

But after that initial Indian journey, tragedies piled up. "Damon's father passed away, and then my father passed away 10 days later," Hewlett says.

The pair traveled back to India a second time, now to the Ganges, knowing this time that the songs they had been writing were bending towards death. Hewlett saw "funeral pyres where they burn the bodies and put the ashes in the Ganges." The ritual goes back 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, perhaps even longer.

Experiences like that changed the way they wanted to approach The Mountain. Gorillaz began to think of late collaborators in contemporary ways.

"Damon had the idea to go over all of the recordings we've done in the last 25 years and find outtakes from all the people we've worked with who have passed away," Hewlett recalls. "Dennis [Hopper] is one of those. We have Dave [Jolicoeur] from De La Soul, we have Bobby Womack, there's Mark E. Smith, Tony Allen," and many more, taken from old recordings that hadn't been used. These were repurposed for the album as "voices from the next place."

Adds Albarn, "It's not nostalgia if it's never been heard before."

The lore of the virtual Gorillaz often tracks with the real-life creators, and The Mountain is no exception. Those losses would eventually become the album's emotional architecture, filtered through the mythology of 2-D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel, who embarked on their own virtual trip to India.

After an instrumental introduction, The Mountain introduces its unique mythology with "Moon Cave." "The Moon Cave is that place where everything, all human ideas, come out," Albarn says. "Whether it's drawing a perfect circle with two sharp bits of obsidian rotating on a bow, or AI, it all comes from the back of the cave, in the shadows."

And as with previous projects, the virtual band is an essential part of the process. Some of this is artistic freedom; as Hewlett explains, "They can have experiences that we are not capable of having yet, and come back from those experiences and tell us about them. It takes us out of the equation somewhat and allows us to get on with being creative and experimenting."

But 2-D and crew also offer rewards for fans longing to go deeper. The themes aren't just reflected in the drawings; they are expanded, given new resonance. In one instance, a character is "wearing a t-shirt with Pikachu dressed as Che Guevara," Hewlett says, "which was inspired by the demonstrations in Turkey when there was a guy dressed in a full Pikachu suit running through the riots with riot police firing rubber bullets. He was running cartoon style and I just thought that was one of the coolest images I've ever seen. Now we have cartoon characters at protests standing up for people."

And of course, Gorillaz are experts on cartoons interacting with reality. Back in 2001, the virtual band was often interpreted as a satire of the "fake" in modern music -- when it wasn't dismissed as a gimmick. Today, with algorithmic playlists and AI Twitch streamers, they feel inarguably real.

Like past albums, The Mountain has moments of political commentary. But the tone has changed. "We're always a bit political on our records," Hewlett says. "But I think this time round we wanted to be a bit more hopeful and optimistic -- give something to lift you up instead of remind you of what you already know, which is the world's fucked."

This allows a cranky deity to take center stage. Songs like "The Happy Dictator," "The God of Lying," and closing track "The Sad God" follow a spiritual power's growing disenchantment with humanity. According to Albarn, "On the record, we finished with the Sad God who's arrived at the conclusion that this parenting of mankind is just not what they expected."

"They gave us everything," Hewlett adds. "And we fucked it up."

That doesn't mean that politics is treated separately. The God of The Mountain is not the head of some religious democracy, as Albarn's lyrics make clear. "At the end I sing about mountains and rainbows, and that's a reference to the origin story of the Kim family in North Korea," he says. "It's autocracy and everything that comes with that."

But this religious parable keeps the failures of man squarely in frame. "The thing about the divine, you know, it goes back to Faust," Albarn says, drawing a comparison to Goethe's literary creation whose quest for knowledge ends in tragedy. "Faust talks about being divine. 'I will be a divine,' you know, 'I will follow the path, the theology.' But man isn't like that, you know? So really, we're all doomed."

That doesn't mean the quest up the Mountain has no value. The journey is full of knowledge and challenge. As Albarn puts it, "It is a mountain, and on your ascent to the summit, you are going to, um, encounter a lot of, uh, contradictory things."

Hewlett quips, "Not an easy word to say after a couple of Negronis -- contradictory."

Perhaps the greatest contradiction is how the dead can feel almost alive to the living. "Moon Cave" explores this theme with living legend Black Thought opposite the late, great Dave Jolicoeur. "He's rapping with his friend who's on the other side," Hewlett says.

Throughout The Mountain, those "voices from the next place" keep up a continuous -- and mystical -- conversation.

The urge to compose while traveling may have grown out of tragedy, but it's here to stay. The Mountain was too rewarding an experience to let go completely.

"That's why it really works, this record," Albarn says, "because we finally found that sense of common cause that we had when we first started the band."

Hewlett adds that "we're already talking about the next album, which will involve more trips." He continues, "I would like to go to North Korea. Damon's been there. I'd like to go with him to North Korea."

Regarding North Korea, Albarn neither confirms nor denies, and in truth he might have stopped paying attention. But the pair have earned the right to be vague about what's next. Twenty-five years into Gorillaz, death and grief led them not to an ending but to something rarer: a creative renewal built on loss, travel, and the stubborn insistence that collaboration across borders still matters.

As the conversation winds down, Hewlett glances over at his partner's side of the screen. "Damon managed to eat his whole dinner during an interview. I'm very impressed."

The cake, like the Negronis, is gone. But the Mountain is still there.