“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”.
