This article is an interview with the UK duo Gorillaz. Across it's length, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett talk us through their latest album, 'The Mountain', their creative proccess as a group, and the reason they decided to centre this album on India.
I remember watching a Gorillaz music video for the first time when I was ten years old. This was mid 2005 in Shenzhen, China. Their sophomore effort, ‘Demon Days’ had just come out, and the music video for 'Feel Good Inc.' was playing on repeat on one of the only two English-language channels in the city at the time. I remember being transfixed and more than a little bewildered. I knew very little about music, but there was something undeniably magnetic about the confluence of that driving bass that melded with its indie rock and hip-hop-laden soundscapes. I was taken in by this animated band made of colourful characters, the members of whom seemed both distinctly human yet simultaneously alien at the same time.
Was this a cartoon? A music video? Was this even a real band? It was like nothing I’d ever experienced both sonically and visually, and despite not giving it too much thought at the time, it’s clear now that I was witnessing a group that was still only just beginning to bring their multifaceted artistic vision to life.
The latest evolution of that vision is ‘The Mountain’, the band's ninth studio album and arguably their most personally significant to date. Written and recorded in the aftermath of profound loss for both members, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the album is a direct reflection of their time spent in India and their experiences with death.
“It comes from the fact that we both lost our fathers while making this record and found ourselves in the most perfect place on planet earth to deal with that and to find a way to deal with it that’s a little different to the way we deal with that in this part of the world which is very gloomy and dark and miserable,” says Jamie. Both Jamie and Damon are speaking to me from their studio in London, with Jamie’s easy-going and affable disposition perfectly contrasting with Damon’s atur-like intensity and seriousness.
“Once you’ve visited Varanasi specifically, you’ve been given an absolutely privileged insight into the journey of life,” ponders Damon. “It’s so poetically played out on the Ghats and the Ganges. It’s wonderful.”
It’s both a love letter and a meditation on the beautiful and heady cocktail of spirituality, devotion, and faith that shapes countless lives across this diverse nation. Without exoticising and orientalising in the way that some Western artists are guilty of doing, it pays homage to India’s cultural essence and delicately folds it into the band's own mythos.
“We’re just asking questions about things that present themselves to us as we grow older,” says Jamie. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff that’s happened in the world in the last 25 years. These are subjects that are on our mind, that we want to talk about, and that have been concerning us. Now we’ve reached this point where we’re getting older, and we’ve lost our fathers and mothers and so you start to ask the question of what is beyond that? It’s to be determined.”
What allows The Mountain to succeed where so many similar albums have failed is the reverence both Jamie and Damon have for the places that they drawn inspiration from. All of the songs on the album still feel fundamentally rooted in what’s become a signature Gorillaz palette — thought-provoking lyricism, a delightful, effervescent bounce, a lingering forbidding about the state of the world and life itself and a host of incredible, diverse collaborators. Yet, at the same time, this album is proof of a band that refuses to rest on its laurels or creatively stagnate.
“The characters are a way for us to experiment and do what we want to do,” says Jamie. “Through them we can work with whoever we want to and see exactly what we want to. I’ve been drawing them for 25 years, so there’s no way they were going to stay the same. I have to continue to reinvent them in order to keep delivering good work.”
India, in that sense, became a place where the duo could tap into a part of their artistry that has, by and large, arguably remained dormant despite an incredibly prolific career. It allowed them to face their demons and their fears and ponder questions that had thus far remained unanswered. In so many ways, the album feels like a profound form of sonic closure, one that calls on the Gorilla's prolific past while looking bravely towards an uncertain future.
“The Indian subcontinent is so rich that even just a drop of Gorillaz into the culture is enough,” says Damon. “I did a lot of homework before I came to India, and I was prepared to give it my best shot. It’s always a trapeze walk. How do you superimpose your ideas on another culture? You can only do it organically but you also have to be educated enough to recognise what you’re confronting. Be very careful trying to assimilate another culture unless you’ve done your homework.”
One of the things that makes this album so pivotal is that it exists in the larger backdrop of hate, bigotry and xenophobia against South Asians in so much of the modern Western world. At a time when the industry is, by and large, choosing to turn a blind eye to injustice, Gorillaz are centring South Asian heritage, music, and identity and defying those that would seek to minimise it.
“The whole Anglo-Saxon, right-wing manosphere is abhorrent to me, and it always has been,” says Damon. “We thought that whole mindspace had been exiled, but now it’s come back in the most insidious way. It’s our duty to fight that.”
One of the standout aspects of any Gorillaz project is how they use collaborations to transport listeners across some very diverse sonic and artistic landscapes. From Tame Impala to Snoop Dog to Sparks, they’ve historically taken the myriad of influences that have shaped their collaborators and woven them into their own sound and lore. The Mountain continues that lineage. Along with homegrown legends like Anoushka Shankar and Asha Bhosle, they’ve also collaborated with Black Thought and alternative hardcore flagbearers IDLES, among others. Damon reckons that this album was a little different collaborator-wise because it features far more instrumentalists than ever before, but asserts that this fits perfectly into the canon of Indian classical music as a whole. “Someone like Anushka (Shankar) is so intuitive that it honestly felt like we were kindred spirits,” he explains. “There’s no roadmap really, we make it up as we go along.”
“We are at a point now with Gorillaz where we can reach out to pretty much anybody and they’ll take it seriously, depending on their own schedule or their religious beliefs,” adds Jamie in half-jest. “But most people say, ‘Sure, I’ll come to the studio’. A wonderful thing happens when musicians get together, no matter what culture they’re from. It all comes together, and it’s a really special thing to watch. I don’t have that in the art world, you know. Artists don’t get together and draw side by side and have that chemistry that musicians have. It’s an amazing thing to watch because it’s about music and that’s everything.”
For this album’s artwork, Jamie says he found himself venturing out of his comfort zone and that it took him some time to create something that remained distinctly ‘Gorillaz’ while interpreting the specific artistic and cultural heritage of India itself. He was meticulous about getting the tonality just right and wanted to make sure he didn't inadvertently offend anybody. He asked a lot of questions and did as much reading as he could, consulting with people and identifying what was appropriate for subject matter that’s often treated very sensitively.
“I was really into drawing the Hindu gods, because as an artist, how exciting is that?” he says. “I spoke to a lot of people about what I could do and what I couldn’t do. It’s been a process, and I’m almost at the end of it, but it’s been really very inspiring and a huge amount of fun to do.”
Tying into the larger theme of life and death, this album has a number of collaborations that pay tribute to members of the Gorillaz family who have passed, such as Dennis Hopper and Bobby Womack. By using archival recordings and unused takes from previous collaborators, the Gorillaz use this album to immortalise individuals who have helped shape the larger tapestry of the Gorillaz’s creative output. “We just wanted to bring them into this world on ‘The Mountain’ in the same way that in some cultures they bring out the bones of their ancestors,” says Damon. “It’s about remembering and honouring and including. It’s that idea that the afterlife is very much with us at all times.”
“With Dennis (Hopper), he managed to do about 15 or 16 takes when he was reading ‘Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head’ and the word ‘mountain’ was mentioned in all of them,” explains Damon. “Just one word from such an iconic-sounding voice is enough sometimes. With Bobby, there was so much stuff — from conversations when we were recording him to him just kind of talking to me while in the vocal booth, so he was really easy. With Marky E Smith, there was so much we hadn’t used while recording ‘Plastic Beach’, I was able to do an entirely new song with him. With Proof, that was such a surprise. We were looking through the recordings, and there was this intact, pristine freestyle he’d done. So we kind of built a whole tune around that.”
Gorillaz’s music has always acted as a sort of multi-medium, countercultural mirror to various epochs over the last two decades. Whether it’s through lyricism, visuals, or instrumentation, both Damn and Jamie have found an approach that allows them to zoom in on the specificity of the time while still creating music that’s timeless and relatable.
“I think you have to write into the future a bit, especially if you infuse politics and social issues into your music,” emphasises Damon. “For example, if you were to write about what was happening with Greenland right now, you’d be missing the point. It’s a little about ‘imagining’ things. What makes an album stand the test of time? Usually, it’s whether the songs are any good. You take a current trope and cast it into the future and see where it lands.”
Both musically and visually, this album feels like both an epilogue to their previous work and a prologue to a new era of discovery. Indeed, ‘The Mountain’ itself revels in its own contradictions. There’s both a weightlessness and a weight to every effort; a palpable joy and a lingering melancholy where a calm breezy interlude gives way to a heady, infectious dance groove.
By taking this approach, Damon and Jamie’s output here reflects the distinctly South Asian duality of death itself. It’s both the end of the people and places you once knew, but the start of another journey; a meeting point between this life and the next. The Mountain immerses us in the duality that is an inescapable part of the lives we lead. Across its length, it compels us to consider our own journeys and underlines the importance of protecting and cherishing what we have while we’re here.
The Gorillaz have never performed in India, but both Jamie and Damon emphasise that India has always been their primary destination for a tour date, despite obvious logistical concerns. “We want to come to India, and we’re very excited about playing in front of an Indian audience,” says Jamie. “I can’t imagine how exciting that would be.”
“It’ll be a dream come true to play in India,” agrees Damon as they sign off.
It’s December 2017. I’m in Pune, India, at the fag end of a long weekend at a music festival. My friend Sohum has the unenviable job of driving a bunch of inebriated early-20-somethings home. Amidst the cacophony of chatter inside the car and the euphoric post-mortem that inevitably follows any festival, the lush, enveloping synth of ‘Melancholy Hill’ pours out of the stereo system and stupefies all of us into silence. There’s a warmth and a glow that emanates from inside the confines of this ostensibly ordinary four-wheel drive. As we drive out of the heaving festival parking lot, we say nothing to each other but revel in the reverie that we’ve all fallen into; the song’s bittersweet cadence providing an poignant bookend to one of those moments in amber we all sometimes wish we could live through again and again.
For me, that’s the beauty of Gorillaz. The sheer number of contexts in which they find themselves being interpreted within has allowed them to transcend the trappings of being just another ‘band’. Whether you’re an impressionable 10-year-old in a foreign land or a bunch of boozed-up young adults out on a night of general debauchery and piss-taking, there’s something about the Gorillaz that will spark something. ‘The Mountain’ continues their indelible visual and musical legacy and fundamentally builds on it. Yes, it’s a cultural bridge that brings so much of the world’s most populous country to a global stage, but beyond that, it’s another defiant piece of counterculture that refuses to cower to the forces of intolerance and artificiality that seem to be ever-present.
If you cut out all the major label bullshit, all the PR and fan service, and everything that comes with promoting and touring an album as a global powerhouse band in 2026, Gorillaz are still the same two blokes who decided they were tired of the lack of substance that seemed all pervasive in the early 90s era of MTV boy bands. Some 25-odd years on, they still have that same chip on their shoulder. As we enter an era of culture where Indian music faces a similar reckoning, The Mountain offers a beacon of hope; a jumping-off point for our own grassroots musical movements and mountains. And we’re all the better for it.
A special thank you to Robach Music Group, Gorillaz's India Music Partner, for helping us put this piece together.
‘The Mountain’ comes out February 27, 2026.
You can follow Gorillaz here.
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