Gorillaz’s ‘The Mountain’ is a balm for a broken world
The music in Gorillaz’s latest album “The Mountain” heals you before you even know why. With heady layers of harps, sitars, and electronic textures, topped by flutes that make your soul feel like soaring, there’s a transcendent tone to the British virtual band’s ninth studio album that lifts your heart before your mind has time to catch up—even without the context of its making.
Susan Sontag argues in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation” that searching for meaning in art can actually diminish its power. A first listen to “The Mountain” will give that total raw experience of feeling, washing over you with pure emotion, before analysis sets in.
Still, the understanding of “The Mountain” deepens the listening experience.
The context, for the record
During the making of “The Mountain,” Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the twin creative forces behind Gorillaz, both lost their fathers, the two men passing away just 10 days apart.
They recorded the 15 tracks of the album at Studio 13 in London and Devon, then traveled to India, working across Mumbai, New Delhi, Rajasthan, and Varanasi. There, they absorbed the music and spiritual landscape that Albarn’s artist father had long been drawn to.
It’s why “The Mountain” moves like “samsara,” the Sanskrit concept of the cycle of death and rebirth, flowing from one track to the next with all its peaks and slopes.
Tinged with a deep fascination for Indian music and culture, the album never feels overstated or exoticized. “I have not suddenly discovered spirituality,” Albarn said in an interview with Rolling Stone India. “I’ve been studying it and trying to immerse myself in it all over the world, because it’s all connected.”
Aspects of the album were executed with a sense of reverence, like Hewlett’s hand-drawn artwork of our favorite characters of the virtual band: Murdoc, Noodle, Russel, and 2D. He developed the visuals through consultation with a Mumbai tattoo artist and local team to respectfully depict the virtual band amid Hindu iconography.
“The Mountain” is multilingual, too, with performances in Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Yoruba. Its collaborators include Anoushka Shankar, Asha Bhosle, Bizarrap, Black Thought, Idles, Johnny Marr, Omar Souleyman, Sparks, Trueno, and Yasiin Bey, alongside posthumous vocal appearances from Bobby Womack and Tony Allen.
Despite the global reach, the album doesn’t feel scattered. While India is the starting point, Latin rhythms, Arabic vocals, and hard rap layer each other to the point of seeming similar, ultimately uniting in one overarching theme, as the songs circle back to the Gorillaz’s personal grief.
As Hewlett told Rolling Stone India, “I said to Damon, if we can make an album about death that makes people feel less afraid of the concept of it, wouldn’t that be an amazing gift?”
Songs with weight
While “The Mountain” covers multicultural influences in scope, through tone, the emotional undercurrent of grief is deeply felt in the songs.
“Orange County,” now at over 25 million listens on Spotify, pairs whistling and deceptively chirpy tunes against heartbreaking lyrics that will make you “sad disco,” as the melancholic banger goes, “You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love… Every face you forgot / Father’s jaw / They suspend the clock / Another start / Get another chance to love.”
Or how about “The Moon Cave,” with its haunting posthumous contribution from Womack that reflects on mortality and spirituality with, “Is the pain where the megahertz is? / Where the masjid, where the church is? / Are the last days where the earth is?”
Then there’s “The Manifesto,” where you might miss the confrontation of death because of the biting bars of rap.
Deafened by headlines
“The Mountain” is not merely inward-looking, either, as the Gorillaz are acutely conscious of the world we exist in.
“Are you deafened by the headlines?” Albarn asks in “The God of Lying,” alongside Idles frontman Joe Talbot. “Or does your head not hear at all?”
In “The Happy Dictator,” inspired by Trump’s America but also Albarn’s travels to Turkmenistan and North Korea, the ominous threat of totalitarianism shows in lines like, “I am the one to give you life again / I am the one to save your soul / Amen.”
The lyrics also point to censorship’s enforced positive light: “No more bad news so you can sleep well at night / And the palace of your mind will be bright.”
An album that leaves you lighter
Through rhythmic wit, “The Mountain” addresses difficult things but in a way that is beautiful.
What keeps the album from feeling heavy, despite the background of grief and a twisted world, is its expansive sound. Like the Gorillaz at their best, the songs constantly shift, and you’re never quite sure where they’ll go next. This unpredictability keeps them buoyant.
This is arguably the most focused Gorillaz album since “Plastic Beach” in 2010, which had a specific theme of ecological satire, as well as “Demon Days,” which explored a post-9/11 survey of the world. “The Mountain” is also unified by the single emotion of heartbreak, but in a way that doesn’t crumble and instead lifts.
In “The Sweet Prince,” the Gorillaz acknowledge sorrow and suffering plainly, ending with acceptance, and the hope of reincarnation or life after death: “There are scars that will never heal / So why pretend they’ve gone away?… Sweet prince, don’t be sad… The sword you hold in your hand / Well, its mighty blow will set you on your patterned path into the next life.”
It has been 25 years since Gorillaz released their debut album. This ninth album does not sound like the band is merely marking time or making an album to protect their legacy. And if there’s one reason for the Gorillaz’s consistent success, it’s because of the unyielding honesty in their art.
“The Mountain” is an honest project by two creative people who lost their fathers, confronted grief head-on, and returned with music that could only have come from people who have nothing left to prove, but much left to feel.
And in its natural multiculturalism, expansive sound, and unflinching emotion, we’re lucky that we listeners get to share in that.
