Why Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain is an optimistic ‘album about death’

It is a Wednesday afternoon in West Hollywood, California, one day after the city was blanketed in a light coating of rain. The midday sun has only just begun to peek through the overcast sky. Its beams are slightly more vivid through the large windows of The West Hollywood Edition hotel. Jamie Hewlett sits at a wooden table, stirring a cappuccino with a black straw. “I mean, who drinks out of a straw when you get past the age of 10, right?” he says, jokingly. After 25 years of bouncing around the globe with Gorillaz, he is still longing for a jet lag cure. Coffee can only do so much. It has been a long few weeks for Hewlett and bandmate Damon Albarn as they roll out the group’s latest endeavour, The Mountain. Just one day before, “House of Kong” opened at Rolling Greens in downtown Los Angeles. The exhibition, initially intended as a Gorillaz 25th-anniversary event, has landed on the West Coast. “I think with this album, we were both quite happy with what we’ve done … and feeling like it was an honest, genuine adventure that was taken, and what we’ve given is something that we’re proud of,” Hewlett says. He and Albarn are also artists at heart and in nature. It is why Gorillaz continues to look and sound the way they do, and why the group are consistently pushing the agenda of how a nonexistent band can still resonate with a group of fans who are very much alive. “The process, the research, the putting it together, the making of it is really fun, and the delivery of it is kind of like a mini death syndrome,” he says. “What you’re required to do is get straight on to the next thing, and you won’t have any time to waste thinking about the fact that the completion of that left you feeling numb, because then you’re excited about the next project.” He adds that Albarn, similarly, is like a “kid in a sweet shop” when he is making music: “The moment it’s finished, there’s no interest in discussing it.” Even so, the album is undeniably their most intimate in recent history. Perhaps it has something to do with the experience of grief that the two lived through, losing their fathers only 10 days apart and just before a trip to India. Or maybe it is a testament to the process behind The Mountain, which saw Hewlett and Albarn travel the country, spending more time together there than during previous album productions. “It’s weird, because I’m born 10 days after Damon … the idea presented itself, and at that point we were going down that road, and there was no avoiding it … It wasn’t even necessarily going to be a Gorillaz project; ‘Let’s go together and see what happens.’” Hewlett says the album was also inspired by his late mother-in-law, Amo, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and opted for Eastern medicine instead of chemotherapy. “She said, ‘No, I’m going to India.’ … She was into Ayurveda medicine and knew this doctor, and she spent three months in India [being treated]. When she came back, her cancer had gone. In France, they call her in for a check-up and they give her a scan. They say, ‘Where’s your cancer gone?’ She said, ‘I’ve been in India,’ and they say, ‘We don’t believe in that.’” It would not be until 2022 that Hewlett visited India himself, under unfortunate circumstances. He was in Belgrade, Serbia, with Albarn shooting the second video from their 2023 album Cracker Island when he received a call from his brother-in-law, who said that Amo had just had a stroke. “They said they saved her, but she went into a coma. I was on a plane to India as quickly as I could get a visa, which wasn’t easy at the Indian embassy in London,” he says. “I spent eight weeks with my wife, Emma, in Jaipur, dealing with that, in a public hospital during a pneumonia epidemic … having that experience that was traumatic; it should have been a reason for me to never go back to India ever again.” But during his time there, it became clear that being in the country had the opposite effect on him. “I completely fell in love with the place and got into their whole concept of death … We met a lot of families who became friends of ours because we were at the hospital every day,” he says. “A loved one who was dying, who was in tears because they knew they were going to die, but also there was a celebration about the fact that they were coming back,” he says. “Their understanding of the cycle of life is a lot more appealing to me.” Shortly after, Hewlett returned to Europe and went straight to Albarn with an idea: “I said, ‘We have to go to India, it’s so amazing,’ and of all the places he’d been around the world, that was the place he still hadn’t been. So we decided to go.” The Mountain is, as expected, heavily doused with notions on the concept of death. Inevitably, the question arose: “How can we make an album about death that would leave the listener feeling optimistic?” But Gorillaz have always been a group entwined with different, equally heavy topics. On their 2010 album Plastic Beach, they tackle the climate crisis and human extinction. The enchanting and rhythmic 2005 song “Dirty Harry” examines war and soldiers, with its single cover even giving a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war film Full Metal Jacket. Though “The God of Lying” – the third single from The Mountain, featuring British post-punk band Idles – is a bouncy song that could have been pulled straight out of the Gorillaz’s self-titled 2001 debut, it feels criminal to compare it with the band’s earlier catalogue, given that Hewlett and Albarn are artists in “perpetual motion”. This has resulted in some of their most sonically and visually impressive work – with styles and genres consistently shifting – but it also asks the listener to be willing to evolve with them. “I think art has to be an evolution,” Hewlett says. “I know what [British painter] David Hockney does at 88 years old, still smoking and drinking his red wine. He wakes up every day … and he does something new, and then the next day he does something new, and that promotes longevity. He’s never bored.” Gorillaz’s “House of Kong” exhibition seems to be contradictory in its existence, more or less serving as a retrospective from a band that not only does not like to look in the rear-view but probably has it taped over altogether. But it is also an organic experience, teeming with originality, despite its familiar marketing as an “immersive experience”. It is more comparable to something out of a Disney or Universal theme park than another gallery that merely projects video onto a wall. “Down here at Kong, we are creating something that … only really existed in Jamie’s drawings and animations and in the minds of the fans of Gorillaz,” says Stephen Gallagher, who served as creative director on the project but has worked with the band since 2018 as well as with Banksy for his “The Walled Off Hotel” and “Dismaland”. “I’d had this idea already: what about if we built a film studio, and then you could do a backstage tour, and you’re seeing behind the scenes of the making of all of these music videos?” he says. “Then that evolved, and it became the ‘House of Kong’.” As for why the exhibition landed in LA for its second showing, Hewlett compares the city to Shanghai when it was “still free and decadent and swinging”. “I love LA … I love it. I’ve been coming here since I was 19 years old … LA might be the last one [showing], to be honest,” he says. “All that stuff in the exhibition belongs to me; this is part of my lifelong collection of weird s***!” “I’d love to get it back at some point,” he jokes.

Why Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain is an optimistic ‘album about death’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Jamie Hewlett shares how grief and a trip to India inspired his and Damon Albarn’s latest project, and why art ‘has to be an evolution’

Jamie Hewlett shares how grief and a trip to India inspired his and Damon Albarn’s latest project, and why art ‘has to be an evolution’