Gorillaz: watch the video for the two new singles “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County”. The album “The Mountain” out in February

Gorillaz are once again showing their hand ahead of the new album “The Mountain”, releasing two unreleased tracks, “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County”, both now available to stream.

The first is “The Hardest Thing”, built around a posthumous contribution from drummer and composer Tony Allen. It's a rarefied, almost suspended track that deals with grief without falling into rhetoric: a floating vocal drifts over a stripped-back production, more evocative than fully realized, as if serving as an emotional prelude to something still to come. That something is “Orange County”, conceived as a companion piece with an opposite temperament. The melody is brighter and more direct, carried by a relaxed groove that grafts the Gorillaz's trademark energy onto a laid-back mood. The track features Bizarrap, Kara Jackson and Anoushka Shankar, who help strike a balance between oblique pop and global influences.

Watch the video for "The Hardest Thing" and "Orange County" below.

In recent months the British band had already previewed “The Mountain” with the single “The Happy Dictator”, followed by “The Manifesto”, “The God of Lying” in collaboration with IDLES, and “Damascus”, featuring Yasiin Bey and Omar Souleyman.

The album will be released on February 27th and will accompany a Gorillaz exhibition-event in Los Angeles. Ahead of its official release, the band will perform the record in full at two special shows on February 22nd and 23rd at the Hollywood Palladium.

The guest list for the new project is, in true Gorillaz fashion, a miniature pop atlas: Black Thought, Asha Puthli, Asha Bhosle, Gruff Rhys, Kara Jackson, Paul Simonon, Johnny Marr, Anoushka Shankar. Then there are the orchestral ensembles (London Arab Orchestra, Demon Strings) and a horn section that further enriches the production. Adding another layer to the project's hall-of-mirrors effect are the so-called “Voices from Elsewhere”: posthumous contributions from figures such as Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Tony Allen and Mark E. Smith, ghostly presences that drift through the record like echoes from a suspended time.

At the same time, Albarn and his virtual collective are gearing up to return to the stage: the world tour kicks off in March and will also touch down in Italy, with two dates already confirmed – June 27th at La Prima Estate in Lido di Camaiore and July 25th in Piazza Unità d'Italy in Trieste. A live return that promises, once again, to be an experience somewhere between a concert, a pop opera and augmented imagination.

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