Gorillaz have always been better in theory than in execution. The cartoon avatars, the rotating guest lists, the concept album pretensions that stretch across entire albums without quite cohering. The best Gorillaz records succeed despite their ambitions. “The Mountain,” released in late February, is the first one that feels like the ambitions and the execution finally arrived at the same place.

This is a record about death and what follows it. Damon Albarn made no secret of that in the press around the album. He is not being morbid for effect. Three of the album’s collaborators, Bobby Womack, Mark E. Smith, and Tony Allen, are gone. Their voices appear here anyway, woven into songs they never finished with someone who is still here processing their absence. That is not a gimmick. It is grief turned into sound.

The scope is enormous. Fifteen songs recorded across London, Devon, India, Turkmenistan, Syria, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. Artists performing in Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Yoruba. Johnny Marr and IDLES and Sparks and Anoushka Shankar and Black Thought and Omar Souleyman. On paper this sounds like a project that would collapse under its own weight. It does not collapse. It breathes.

The key is that the collaborations feel chosen rather than curated. Marr’s guitar on “Empty Dream Machine” does not sound like a celebrity cameo. It sounds like the only guitar that could have been on that song. Shankar’s sitar work moves through the record’s mid-section in ways that expand the rhythmic vocabulary without ever calling attention to itself. IDLES show up somewhere in the back half and rather than derailing things, they fit the record’s texture of barely controlled tension.

“Orange County,” produced with Bizarrap, is the clearest pop moment on the record and one of the best Gorillaz songs in years. The hook is genuinely euphoric in a way the band has not pulled off since “Stylo.” It earns its placement as a kind of emotional midpoint before the album turns toward its more difficult final stretch.

That final stretch is where “The Mountain” separates itself from anything else in the Gorillaz catalog. The last four songs work as a suite, moving through something that feels less like album-closing convention and more like an actual reckoning. The posthumous contributions from Womack, Smith, and Allen are distributed across these tracks. You are listening to people who died talking about the things people talk about when they know they are running out of time. That is not easy to make without it feeling exploitative. Albarn somehow keeps it from feeling that way.

Is it perfect? No. There are passages in the middle of the record where the density becomes indistinct, where the layering tips from lush to murky. A few of the guest spots feel underwritten relative to the space the musicians are given. The fifteen-song runtime is about a song and a half too long.

But those are complaints about a record that is reaching for something most contemporary pop will not attempt. “The Mountain” is the kind of album that justifies the existence of the Gorillaz project. It is genuinely surprising, emotionally serious, and sonically unlike anything else out this year. That combination is rarer than it should be.