Gorillaz

Gorillaz should not have lasted this long. The premise, a virtual band of cartoon characters fronted by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, was clever enough for an early 2000s concept but the kind of thing that usually burns bright for a record or two before the joke runs dry. Twenty-five years in, the project is still generating genuinely interesting music, still pulling in collaborators who have no business sounding as good together as they do, and still doing something that most actual bands cannot manage: evolving without abandoning what made them.

Albarn started Gorillaz as a reaction to Blur’s implosion and to what he saw as the narrowing of British rock at the turn of the millennium. He wanted something porous, something that could absorb hip-hop and electronic music and West African pop without having to explain itself. The cartoon wrappers gave the project cover. 2D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel were not a band so much as a delivery system, a way to make music that crossed genre lines without a real person having to answer for it.

The debut album arrived in 2001 and was immediately something else entirely. Del the Funky Homosapien appeared on it. Miho Hatori appeared on it. It sounded like nothing else on British radio that year, which was partly the point. Demon Days in 2005 expanded the reach further, producing what might still be the band’s most coherent album, a record dark enough to feel urgent and accessible enough to sell out arenas.

Since then, the catalog has been uneven in the way that sprawling projects run by restless people tend to be. Plastic Beach was ambitious and a little chaotic. Humanz arrived in 2017 feeling like a party held over a trapdoor. Song Machine was essentially a delivery mechanism for collaborations released in serial form, which turned out to suit the band perfectly. The songs were good. Some were great.

What keeps Gorillaz interesting is Albarn’s refusal to settle into one mode. He continues to pull collaborators from unexpected places, continues to treat the animated characters as both constraint and freedom, and continues to make records that sound like a person who is genuinely curious about what music can hold. The cartoon band turns out to be a very efficient vehicle for that curiosity.

There is a cover story out this week in Consequence featuring the band, and new music appears to be incoming. Whether or not the next record lives up to the best of what came before, the project itself remains one of the stranger success stories in recent British music history. A joke that turned into an institution. That does not happen by accident.