GORILLAZ - The Mountain

You know the hardest thing

Is to say goodbye to someone you love

That’s the hardest thing

Death, mourning and finally the liberating idea that life, in other forms, goes on. A belief that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett came to terms with when they lost their respective fathers ten days apart, and which they later translated into music on "The Mountain", the album with which the holograms drop the mask and reveal their true, human face, made of emotion, emptiness, and redemption.

The image of Damon Albarn arriving at midnight on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, the ancient Indian city at the heart of Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, death and mourning, to scatter his late father's ashes, is the snapshot that captures the new work by Gorillaz. "What you understand," explains Hewlett, who during a trip to that very country recently lost his mother-in-law as well, "is that there's no better place than India to come to terms with death. In the West, death is final. In India, on the other hand, the sadness comes from knowing you won't see that family member again in this form, but we celebrate the idea that they'll begin again."

Atop a mountain that has never felt so enchanted, Gorillaz - on their ninth studio album, the first for their own label Kong - arrive, as is now tradition, in the company of plenty of guests. This time, though, not all of them are flesh and blood: the record is populated by the ghosts of old friends and collaborators, presences that nonetheless feel more real and alive than ever. Tony Allen, former partner in musical mischief who passed away in 2020, opens "The Hardest Thing" in an ambient cloud that blossoms into a small orchestral ensemble, conceptually pairing with the following "Orange County". The spirit of Dennis Hopper hovers over the title track, the first of a series of songs in which the sitar played by Anoushka Shankar conjures up another spirit, that of her father, the great Ravi Shankar. Turning "Delirium" into a dance-pop bacchanal is Mark E. Smith, with his unmistakable, sorely missed style.

Recorded between London and various American and Indian cities, "The Mountain" continually alternates between sacredness and lightheartedness, traditional music and pop, declined in the most varied forms. While it's clear that the main point of reference here is India, for obvious reasons, there's no shortage of African-tinged inflections in "The Happy Dictator", an excellent big single arm-in-arm with Sparks, already unveiled in recent weeks and inspired by a trip Albarn took with his daughter to Turkmenistan, or the synthetic Middle East of "Damascus", featuring Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey, or again the South America that provides the backdrop to the hip-hop of "The Manifesto", masterfully guided by Argentine rapper Trueno. A recurring presence in the tracklist - among many - is Johnny Marr, joined on the chiaroscuro "Casablanca" by another legend of British rock: Paul Simonon.

Also worth noting is the typically Gorillaz 2 tone groove of "The God Of Lying", featuring Idles, as well as the synthetic midtempo of "The Plastic Guru", graced not only by a splendid chorus but also by the presence of a Bollywood choir recruited in Mumbai. And since on this long journey we've returned to India, and more precisely to the boundless universe of Bollywood, we can't fail to mention ninety-one-year-old diva Asha Bhosle at the mic on "The Shadowy Light", declaiming: "Lower my boat into the deep waters/ And carry me to the other side/ Where there is neither joy nor sorrow/ Neither victory nor defeat/ Where the universe becomes one with me".

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27/02/2026