The Mountain will likely be seen by some as Gorillaz’ White Album. It fits a similar role in their story—a genre-agnostic sprawl, inspired by a trip to India and a study of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, with even a connection to Ravi Shankar (his daughter Anoushka plays sitar on multiple tracks). But where the White Album was The Beatles redefining what pop culture could achieve in 1968, The Mountain is deliberately not that. For Gorillaz, that came in the early 2000s with their self-titled effort and Demon Days, when the unheard-of phenomenon was still fresh. You had a gang of grotty cartoon weirdos as the ‘band’, spearheaded by Blur’s Damon Albarn and Tank Girl co-creator Jamie Hewlett, in a way that somehow parlayed indie fandom into a space accommodating to alt-rap icons like De La Soul and Del The Funky Homosapien.
But even as the focus of Gorillaz has refracted and dispersed since, and the guest starts continue to be stacked as high as its titular landform, The Mountain aims to be plaintive and insular. Its core theme is samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth, in the wake of Hewlett’s mother-in-law passing in 2023, and both his and Albarn’s fathers in 2024 within just ten days of each other. Thus, there’s a more tangible spirituality weaving through the mists of The Mountain. The sonic palette is evocative of that, thanks to added textures from the flute, sitar and sarod. Moreover, a good few guest performers appear in posthumous recordings, almost a literal interpretation of ‘death and rebirth’ that places them as spirits back amongst the mortal plane.
It places Albarn in a relatively rare spot for modern Gorillaz albums where he’s not subsumed by the volume of guest stars. Fitting for an album like The Mountain, he’s a considerable narrative presence rather than a glorified curator. Even with the processing that swaddles his vocals—a persistent bugbear on newer Gorillaz albums when Albarn is far from a powerhouse to begin with—it meets the notion of wounding in the wake of great loss. Despite how prismatic the vision remains, The Mountain is surprisingly straightforward and grabbable for a modern Gorillaz album. Perhaps that’s what happens when you have such a stark, immovable image as a mountain at the centre of your work, where every next step has to be conscious of reaching its summit. It’s what makes any diversions (namely into geopolitical spaces) land oddly, both for good and for ill. On one hand, you’ve got the roiling production and some inspired interplay between Yasiin Bey and Omar Souleyman on Damascus; on the other, the satire and squishy synthpop from Sparks on The Happy Dictator has it feeling more like a Humanz leftover.
Generally, though, there’s an elegance to how The Mountain’s themes and performers weave together. Legendary Indian actress and playback singer Asha Bhosle works excellently as an ethereal conduit between the lands of the living and the dead on The Shadowy Light. Elsewhere, Argentine rapper Trueno delivers one of the album’s spirited showcases on The Manifesto, a pillar of rejuvenation that even a language barrier can’t suppress. The multilingual nature of The Mountain—featuring performances in English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Yoruba—becomes reflective of the universality that Gorillaz’ releases have often fostered. The narrative, therefore, ends up spreading that much wider and dipping into more vivid colours and patterns. ‘Kaleidoscopic’ has been a word already widely attributed to this album, and not for no reason.
On top of that, there’s a patience to The Mountain and how it unwraps itself that’s especially advantageous. It might be over an hour long but this isn’t some Herculean monster; across its individual avenues, it is manageable. And that’s while accounting for the modern Gorillaz style of experimental synthpop, where tempos wind and colours are allowed to drip and desaturate. (Especially towards the album’s end is what constitutes its most ‘normal’.) Again, it’s down to The Mountain’s collaborative journey. The title track is a gorgeous introduction, essentially a piece of world music to set that scene that inadvertently sits among the album’s highlights. Other artists’ fingerprints take different shapes—Bizarrap’s production brings an almost saccharine jauntiness to Orange County; Delirium morphs into a thumping dance-punk banger around the late Mark E. Smith; and anytime Black Thought delivers a verse, all attention snaps tightly onto him.
And yet, there’s just something about The Mountain that remains centred as a Gorillaz album. That’s a hard thing to put a specific boundary on as it is, but this does feel like one. Amid its eclecticism, Albarn is the arrow that guides it along, and for an act that most wants to be associated with its gaggle of animated miscreants, it’s done in a very human way. Rarely has there been more of an earnestness to Gorillaz than what you might find on The Mountain. It’s a cleansed, meditative listen, and probably the most all-around solid that a new chapter has been in a while.
For fans of: Radiohead, Tame Impala, The Beatles
‘The Mountain’ by Gorillaz is out now on KONG.
Words by Luke Nuttall
