The Mountain debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart on March 1, 2026. It was the third chart topping studio album in Gorillaz's twenty five year career, alongside Demon Days and Humanz. In the United States it entered the Billboard 200 at number seven, ahead of every previous Gorillaz release in that market. Those numbers are worth stating precisely because they sit in tension with what the album actually is: a record about grief, made in part in India, featuring posthumous contributions from four dead musicians and live performances in five languages. Commercial success and formal ambition are supposed to be in conflict. The Mountain refuses that arrangement.
Gorillaz exists as a project shared between Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. Albarn writes and performs. Hewlett draws the world the music inhabits. The four animated characters, 2D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs, have been the public face for an extraordinarily varied body of work across nine studio albums and twenty five years. The conceit was never ironic. It was always a structural choice that let the music be its own content rather than a vehicle for managing public image.
What Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett Found After Their Fathers Died
The record's origin is documented and worth stating directly. Both Albarn and Hewlett lost their fathers in 2024. That kind of loss does not produce music automatically, and it does not produce good music by virtue of being genuine. What the two of them did was take themselves somewhere unfamiliar. They traveled to India. They worked in Mumbai, New Delhi, Rajasthan, and Varanasi, and extended further into Ashgabat, Damascus, Miami, and New York before returning to London and Devon. They found, in traditions that have developed intricate frameworks for understanding mortality, something their own cultural inheritance had not given them.
The Mountain does not announce this backstory on every track. It is not a confessional album in the way that term is usually applied. The grief is structural rather than decorative. It shapes arrangements, tempo choices, the way vocal performances sit in the mix. The album is built from loss without being about loss in any reductive sense. It is about what survives loss, which is a different and harder thing to make music about.
The Collaborators and Why the Cast Holds
The guest list for The Mountain is extensive and specific. Anoushka Shankar contributes sitar. Ajay Prasanna plays bansuri flute. Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, two of the most accomplished musicians of their respective instruments working today, appear across multiple tracks. The Indian classical instrumentation here is compositional, woven into the architecture of the songs in ways that determine how the electronic production fits around it.
Sparks, the American art pop duo whose career stretches back to the early 1970s, appear on "The Happy Dictator," the lead single released September 11, 2025 alongside the album announcement. Ron and Russell Mael have been making music that is simultaneously funny, unsettling, and formally inventive for over fifty years. Their presence alongside Gorillaz is not incongruous. Both projects operate in the space where entertainment and discomfort coexist deliberately.
IDLES, the band from Bristol working in a post punk tradition, contribute to "The God of Lying," released November 6, 2025. "Damascus" brings together Omar Souleyman, the Syrian singer and dabke musician, with Yasiin Bey, the rapper formerly known as Mos Def. In practice it works because the album's framework is wide enough to hold both without either being reduced.
The posthumous contributions are where the album becomes something that cannot be described simply as a collaboration record. Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Tony Allen, Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack: all dead, all present here through archive recordings. This choice is not a gimmick. It is the central argument made audible.
Johnny Marr contributes guitar. Paul Simonon plays bass. Jalen Ngonda appears and fits naturally. Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals returns. "Orange County," released January 15, 2026, features Bizarrap alongside Kara Jackson and Anoushka Shankar, three artists whose instincts are so different from one another that their combination should not cohere. It does, because the album's architecture is genuinely that wide.
The Singles as Editorial Position
The campaign for The Mountain began slowly and accumulated. "The Happy Dictator" in September 2025 established tone. "The Manifesto," featuring Trueno and Proof, came out October 8. "The God of Lying" followed November 6. "Damascus" arrived in December. "Orange County" in January 2026. Five singles before the February 27 release date, each approaching the record from a different angle.
This matters because it represents a position about what a campaign is supposed to do. The conventional approach uses singles to establish a single identity for the album and repeat that identity. Gorillaz, releasing through their own imprint Kong with distribution via The Orchard, did not operate that way. Each single showed a different face of the same record. Listeners arriving at the album already had five different entry points, none of which had fully prepared them for the whole.
Recording Across Ten Cities as Method
The album was recorded in London, Devon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Rajasthan, Varanasi, Ashgabat, Damascus, Miami, and New York. Five languages appear across the tracklist: English, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, and Yoruba. Musicians from five continents participated. These facts are often presented as evidence of ambition. They are actually evidence of a compositional method.
When Albarn works in India, the musicians he collaborates with are not there to add flavoring to a predetermined arrangement. They shape what the arrangement becomes. The geography of recording is the creative condition, not the backdrop to it. The bansuri flute on certain tracks is doing structural work that the other instruments are calibrated around.
What Twenty Five Years and Nine Albums Actually Mean
The Mountain follows Cracker Island in 2023 and Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez in 2020. Gorillaz has never settled into a repeating style. Each record has reconceived the project from a different premise. What The Mountain shares with Demon Days, which remains the most widely cited peak of their discography, is not sonic similarity but a quality of necessity. Demon Days was made in response to something specific happening in the world. The Mountain was made in response to something specific happening to the people who created it.
In January 2025, to mark their silver anniversary, Gorillaz released a video titled NOSTALGIAZ and began a capsule collection and reissue program. These were not the moves of a band coasting. They were the moves of a project still in active relationship with its own history.
The virtual band concept, the animated characters, the Hewlett visual identity that has defined Gorillaz from the beginning: all of these have always been tools for creating distance from the usual noise of music industry celebrity. That distance was the point. The Mountain uses it to approach material that would have been considerably harder to make in a more conventionally autobiographical context. The Gorillaz architecture gives Albarn a different kind of access to his own experience. The music carries the emotional reality without requiring the artist to wear it visibly.
The album entered the UK chart at number one. It should be heard for what it is.
