Gorillaz

• 1. Introduction

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  Gorillaz are an English virtual band formed in 1998 by musician Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett. Their four members - 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs - have never actually existed, yet they have given interviews, starred in music videos, and performed at the Grammy Awards. The band's debut album sold over 7 million copies worldwide. Their follow-up went six times platinum in the UK alone. How did two people watching MTV in a London flat invent one of the most commercially successful acts of the 2000s, and what does it mean to build a band around characters who cannot pick up a guitar? Those are the questions that drive the story of Gorillaz.

• 2. A Flat on Westbourne Grove

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  Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett first crossed paths in 1990 when guitarist Graham Coxon, a fan of Hewlett's work, arranged for him to interview Blur. The interview appeared in Deadline, the magazine that had made Hewlett's comic strip Tank Girl famous. Hewlett's first impression of Albarn was blunt: he thought him "arsey, a wanker." The two became acquaintances, though they clashed often, particularly after Hewlett began seeing Coxon's former girlfriend, Jane Oliver. Years later, the friction dissolved into proximity. By 1997 Hewlett had broken up with Oliver and Albarn was ending his widely reported relationship with Justine Frischmann of Elastica. The two moved into a shared flat on Westbourne Grove in London. It was in that flat, in front of a television tuned to MTV, that Gorillaz was conceived. Hewlett described what he saw on screen: "If you watch MTV for too long, it's a bit like hell - there's nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a virtual band, something that would be a comment on that." Albarn framed the same idea slightly differently, noting that the boy band explosion of that period felt "so manufactured" and that the two of them wanted to make a manufactured band that was, in his words, "kind of interesting." The visual template for the project may have originated even earlier, in a rejected comic strip Hewlett had conceived with Tank Girl co-creator Alan Martin called The 16s. The band called themselves "Gorilla" at first, and the first song they ever recorded was "Ghost Train", later released as a B-side.

• 3. Building the Debut

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  From 1998 to 2000 Albarn recorded the self-titled debut album at Studio 13 in London, which he had recently opened, and at Geejam Studios in Jamaica. He started alone, but partway through he called in American hip-hop producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, explaining: "I called Dan the Automator in after I'd done more than half of it and felt it would benefit from having somebody else's focus. So I just rang him and asked whether he was interested in helping me finish it off." Nakamura had recently co-created Deltron 3030 with rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and DJ Kid Koala, and he brought both of them into the Gorillaz sessions. Del appeared on two tracks, including what would become the lead single "Clint Eastwood", while Kid Koala contributed turntables throughout. The album also drew in Ibrahim Ferrer of Buena Vista Social Club, Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. The sessions produced the band's first release, the EP Tomorrow Comes Today, on the 27th of November 2000, which introduced the fictional band members in their first music video. The debut album itself arrived on the 26th of March 2001, entering the UK Albums Chart at No. 3 and the US Billboard 200 at No. 14 before eventually selling over 7 million copies worldwide, powered largely by "Clint Eastwood". For the tour that followed, Albarn played entirely behind a giant screen on which Hewlett's visuals were projected. In later interviews Albarn described the constraint as almost unbearable: "For someone who had just spent the last ten years out front being a frontman, it was a really weird experience. And I have to say, some nights I just wanted to get a knife and just cut the screen and stick my head through."

• 4. Demon Days and Danger Mouse

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  Albarn spent most of 2003 touring with Blur in support of Think Tank, but once that was finished he returned to Gorillaz. Hewlett was clear about the stakes: returning for a second album was about proving the project was not "a gimmick." "If you do it again," he said, "it's no longer a gimmick, and if it works then we've proved a point." For the new album Albarn enlisted Brian Burton, known by his stage name Danger Mouse, whose 2004 mashup album The Grey Album had caught Albarn's attention. Burton described a creative partnership marked by mutual respect and honest competition: "We never had any arguments. We even have that finish-each-other's-sentences thing happening." The resulting album, Demon Days, was released on the 11th of May 2005, debuted at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 6 on the US Billboard 200, and went on to become the band's most commercially successful record to date, reaching six times platinum in the UK, double platinum in the United States, and triple platinum in Australia. The album's lead single "Feel Good Inc.", featuring hip-hop group De La Soul, topped Billboard's Alternative Songs chart in the US for eight consecutive weeks and appeared in an Apple iPod commercial. Rather than tour conventionally, Gorillaz staged a five-night residency at the Manchester Opera House in November 2005, performing the album in full each night with most of the featured artists present. The touring band was visible but lit so that only silhouettes were seen, with Hewlett's visuals on a screen above. The residency was later reprised at New York City's Apollo Theater in April 2006. At the 48th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2006, the band won Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for "Feel Good Inc.", appearing to perform on stage via Musion Eyeliner holographic projection technology. Albarn's disappointment with the execution was pointed: the technology required such a low volume that bass frequencies would "mess up the illusion completely."

• 5. Plastic Beach and a Breaking Point

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  Albarn and Hewlett had begun exploring a theatrical concept called Carousel after completing the opera Monkey: Journey to the West, which premiered at the 2007 Manchester International Festival. Carousel, as Hewlett described it in 2008, was to be "even bigger and more difficult than Monkey," a hybrid of film and stage, with Albarn having written around 70 songs for it. The concept eventually dissolved into what became Plastic Beach. Released on the 3rd of March 2010, the album was inspired by the idea of a secret floating island in the South Pacific made from the debris and waste of human civilization, a concept that grew partly from plastic Albarn had found on a beach near his home in Devon and partly from awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Albarn produced the album alone, without a co-producer, describing it as "the most pop record I've ever made." He assembled an enormous cast of collaborators, including Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, and orchestral contributions from the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music. The album debuted at No. 2 on both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200, the band's highest chart debut to that point. The tour that followed, the Escape to Plastic Beach Tour, was the band's first in which the touring band performed fully in view of the audience, but Albarn later called it economically disastrous: "I loved doing it, but economically it was a fucking disaster." Behind the scenes, Hewlett grew frustrated that the visual dimension of Gorillaz was shrinking. He described watching the screen behind the band on stage: "The screen on stage behind them seemed to get smaller every day." In April 2012 Albarn told a newspaper that he and Hewlett had fallen out and that future Gorillaz projects were "unlikely." The collaboration that had produced three major albums and a Grammy Award had fractured under the weight of competing visions. By June 2013 Hewlett confirmed that the two planned to return, saying "We'll come back to it when the time is right."

• 6. The iPad Album and a Crossover

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  During the North American leg of the Escape to Plastic Beach Tour in the autumn of 2010, Albarn continued making music entirely on his iPad. The resulting recordings were released as The Fall on Christmas Day 2010, co-produced with Stephen Sedgwick, the band's mixer engineer. Albarn was explicit about preserving the recordings without alteration: "I literally made it on the road. I didn't write it before, I didn't prepare it. I just did it day by day as a kind of diary of my experience in America." On the 23rd of February 2012, the band released "DoYaThing", a song created for a Gorillaz-branded Converse shoe collection as part of Converse's "Three Artists, One Song" project, with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and Andre 3000 of Outkast as the other two contributors. The song existed in two versions: a four-and-a-half minute radio edit and a full 13-minute release on the Gorillaz website. The crossover instinct that "DoYaThing" demonstrated - importing figures from adjacent worlds into the Gorillaz universe - reappeared years later with a character from Cartoon Network's animated series The Powerpuff Girls. During The Now Now album cycle, the band introduced Ace from that series as a fictional temporary bassist, filling in for the imprisoned Murdoc Niccals. Albarn described the decision as organic: "We were massive fans of The Powerpuff Girls when they came out, the energy of that cartoon was really cool." In the credits for the 2019 documentary Reject False Icons, filmed and directed by Hewlett's son Denholm, Remi Kabaka Jr. was listed as an official member of the band for the first time, credited as A&R/Producer alongside Albarn and Hewlett.

• 7. Song Machine and the Serial Model

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  On the 29th of January 2020 Gorillaz announced Song Machine, a web series structured around releasing one new song a month as "episodes." Eleven episodes were released to form the first season. Albarn described the thinking in simple terms: "We no longer kind of see ourselves as constrained to making albums. We can now make episodes and seasons." The first episode, "Momentary Bliss", was released on the 31st of January 2020 and featured British rapper Slowthai and the Kent-based punk-rock duo Slaves. Subsequent episodes brought in Fatoumata Diawara, Peter Hook, Tony Allen, Skepta, Schoolboy Q, Robert Smith of the Cure, Elton John, and Beck, among others. The episode featuring Tony Allen and Skepta, "How Far?", was released on the 2nd of May without a music video, as a tribute: Allen had died on the 30th of April. The music video for Beck's episode, "The Valley of the Pagans", became notable as the first major studio production filmed inside the video game Grand Theft Auto V. The season culminated with the album Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, released on the 23rd of October 2020. On the 10th of August 2021, Gorillaz debuted three songs at the O2 Arena in London at a free concert held exclusively for National Health Service employees and their families; the same songs were performed again for a public audience the following night. Those three tracks - "Meanwhile", "Jimmy Jimmy", and "Deja Vu" - comprised a new EP entitled Meanwhile. The announcement of the EP came first through its cover being published on TikTok.

• 8. The Mountain and What Followed

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  To mark their 25th anniversary, Gorillaz released a video on the 29th of January 2025 titled Nostalgiaz, setting clips from their music videos to "Pirate's Progress" from Plastic Beach. Later that year, from the 8th of August to the 3rd of September, the band staged an exhibition at London's Copper Box called "House of Kong", which included daily live performances where they played their first three albums. Their self-titled debut was performed on the 29th of August, Demon Days on the 30th, and Plastic Beach on the 2nd of September. For the closing show on the 3rd of September, the band played 15 songs from a new, then-unnamed album with guests including Sparks, Yasiin Bey, Omar Souleyman, Asha Bhosle, and Johnny Marr. On the 11th of September 2025 the band officially announced their ninth studio album, The Mountain, with a release date of the 27th of February 2026. The lead single, "The Happy Dictator", featured Sparks. The Mountain drew musical and thematic inspiration from India and received widespread critical acclaim, regarded by several reviewers as their strongest work in years. The Mountain Tour running from March 2026 into January 2027 included the band's first ever performances in India. On the 7th of March 2026 Gorillaz performed on Saturday Night Live, playing "Clint Eastwood" - the song that first introduced the world to their virtual universe more than two decades earlier - alongside the new track "The Moon Cave", featuring Asha Puthli, Black Thought, and Anoushka Shankar.