“You know, the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love,” croons Damon Albarn on Gorillaz’s richly expansive ninth album, The Mountain. It’s a direct sentiment that scores its way through the multi-layered single “Orange County”, on which sadness is balanced by breezy whistled melody, sunny blasts of brass and soothing echoes of sitar.
Both Albarn and his Gorillaz co-creator, artist Jamie Hewlett, lost their fathers in 2024 and processed their grief via two “magical” trips to India. Albarn scattered his dad Keith’s ashes in the river Ganges, embracing what he described as the country’s more open and “positive outlook on death”.
That flow of fire and water philosophy can be felt in the swirling currents of The Mountain, delivered via the cartoon band’s reliably eclectic festival of contributors. It’s there in the graceful rippling Hindi of 92-year-old Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle (whose joyful wisdom soars over the arcade game synths of “Shadowy Light”), the bubbling zest of Argentine rapper Trueno (who brings Latin muscle “The Manifesto”), and in the gleefully explosive ranting of the late Mark E Smith, who hurls manic laughter and free associated lines about sin, shrunken heads and wooden tits into the industrial, choir-backed pulse of “Delirium”.
The Fall frontman is just one of many posthumous contributors here, reminding us that music can keep ghosts alive and – by spinning outtake samples of vanished voices into new forms – even serve as a kind of reincarnation. It’s wonderful to get visitations from former Gorillaz guest stars such as rebel actor Dennis Hopper (who appeared on the band’s 2005 album Demon Days and died aged 74 in 2010), through Nigerian-Ghanaian drummer Tony Allen (featured on 2020’s Song Machine project; he died aged 79 the same year) to rapper and Eminem hype man Proof (who recorded the single “911” with Gorillaz in 2001, five years before he was shot dead, aged 32, in 2006).
Over 15 tracks, a giddy mix of moods, genres, cultures, languages and time periods is woven together with virtuosic ease by Anoushka Shankar’s liquid sitar, Johnny Marr’s shimmering guitar and Ajay Prasanna’s gliding bamboo flute. Highlights include “The Happy Dictator” (feat Eighties electronic pioneers Sparks); swaggering “The God of Lying” with IDLES; dreamy, cocktail hour-turned-soul bop “The Moon Cave” (partying with Asha Puthli, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Jalen Ngonda and Black Thought), and hectic, high-octane Arabic jam “Damascus” with Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey.
There is so much going on on The Mountain that even writing about it turns into a dense pattern of times, places and people. It’s best to sit back and contemplate the album as a musical mandala. Allow your mind to drift through its geometry of recurring ideas and Albarn’s undimmed gift for tossing out bittersweet melodies and lyrics that (as on the elegantly subdued “Casablanca”) contrast mundane experience of “tunnels to suburbia” with yawning abstracts like “the abyss”, or the alienated viewpoint of the “lone shooter” with the warm connection of “the kiss”. That’s the way to the summit, through the sprawl.
