The idea had been for Damon Albarn and Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett to renew their creative vows by embarking on some “classic Indian odysseys.” Between their two trips to the country, however, the assignment changed shape. In the space of 10 days, both men’s fathers died, and the second visit took on an air of somber pilgrimage. Albarn swam in the Ganges, scattered his father’s ashes into its mythology. Somewhere along the way, he settled on a concept for The Mountain, the follow-up to 2023’s pallid Cracker Island. As well as recruiting a suite of classical Indian orchestra, he would raid his archives for unreleased recordings by deceased Gorillaz collaborators, enacting a convocation of souls.
Grand concepts in place, the pair of art-school Peter Pans proceeded as you might expect. Hewlett drew a cartoon in which a turbaned Russel charms a cobra with a flute (“a bit dated, this one,” Rolling Stone India noted) and Albarn started giving quotes like, “My early years were full of sitar music and incense.” In Albarn’s eager telling, India was not only a creative wellspring but a haven from the “celebrity virus that we all got from America,” a glimpse of a world where artists “could all work together in a wonderful, socialist way.” He was at pains to point out that he had not “suddenly discovered spirituality” in the Eat Pray Love tradition, Rolling Stone India reported, eyebrow still half raised. To Albarn, The Mountain was a humble meditation on grief, samsara-style, tinged with his artist father’s fascination with Indian music and culture.
No score yet, be the first to add.
This willful overreach is more or less business as usual for Albarn and his old housemate Hewlett, who, by conceiving this cartoon combo of multiracial punks in 1998, advanced a vision of pop hybridity that anticipated our age of cultural superabundance. Outstepping their lot as two white Brits was always part of the calculation. (“It was a risk: Damon singing reggae,” Albarn told Q in 2001. “But [cartoon avatar] 2-D singing reggae is fine.”) However simple his artistic code, few Britpop-era megastars have done more than Albarn to forswear allegiance to fusty rock purism—perhaps not even Thom Yorke, who may have written Kid A but did not go so far as naming his child after Missy Elliott.
Nor did Yorke decide, the day after 9/11, to cajole the stranded Detroit rap posse D12 into a West London studio to reckon with the news in real time. Albarn did, and at the heart of The Mountain is an unearthed recording from that 2001 session: a freestyle by the late rapper Proof, riffing on the grisly reality of murder five years before his own. The resulting song, “The Manifesto,” fashions a preset beat on an old portable organ into a hell-raising, seven-minute bhangra anthem with heavy artillery from Argentine rapper Trueno, bisected by a half-time interlude for Proof’s mortal reflections. The thrill of music like this has less to do with its compositional merits than its hatfuls of Albarnian audacity. Only he would devise this morbid musical séance and see the idea through; only he would have had D12 in the room to begin with. “The Manifesto” is a fine pop song but a shining testament to a quarter-century of Gorillaz hubris—Proof’s aural time capsule rising from the earth, Albarn poised to break it open on a canvas stretched just as wide as it will go.
