When they emerged from the ashes of Blur at the tail end of the 1990s, they didn’t just form a new band, they introduced a new possibility. Conceived by Blur’s Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, the project was born from a simple irritation: the vacant gloss of MTV-era celebrity culture. Their solution wasn’t protest, but parody.

Instead of offering more flesh-and-blood rock stars, they built a virtual band — a satanic bassist named Murdoc, a hollow-eyed singer called 2-D, an exorcised drummer possessed by hip-hop spirits, and a preternaturally gifted child assassin named Noodle. The joke was obvious, but the execution wasn’t.

Though animated, Gorillaz functioned like any “real” act: they gave interviews, starred in music videos, toured arenas with holograms and live collaborators, and developed detailed lore that rivalled prestige television. From the beginning, Albarn and Hewlett understood that image and narrative were no longer accessories to pop music — they were the foundation.

What they created was less a band than a multimedia universe — dystopian, sarcastic, and uncomfortably human — a bleak reflection of the century unfolding around it.

Across 2001’s self-titled debut and 2005’s Demon Days, Albarn’s songwriting mirrored the band’s animated unease. The music stitched together dub, hip-hop, Britpop residue, trip-hop haze, and electro gloom into something that felt borderless long before streaming algorithms made that the norm.

Lyrically, Albarn aimed outward. The Iraq War. Environmental collapse. Media manipulation. Celebrity decay. The songs were catchy enough to infiltrate radio but angsty enough to rot beneath it. “Clint Eastwood,” “Feel Good Inc.,” and “DARE” didn’t just define the 2000s, they smuggled critique into pop’s bloodstream.

At a time when rock music was busy mythologizing authenticity, Gorillaz weaponized artificiality. They were fake — deliberately so — and that allowed them to tell an uncomfortable truth; that the line between identity and performance was rapidly blurring 

If the early years were satire, 2010’s Plastic Beach was dramatic expansion.

It marked the moment when Gorillaz stopped feeling like a clever concept and started feeling like a global collective. Collaborators weren’t decorative so much as integral. Snoop Dogg. Yasiin Bey. Bobby Womack. Lou Reed. The Lebanese National Orchestra for Arabic Music. Each presence reshaped the album’s architecture beyond simple additions of star power.

Sonically, Albarn stretched further than ever — from West Coast rap to orchestral Middle Eastern arrangements to shimmering synthwave. Conceptually, the record explored consumer waste and ecological collapse through Hewlett’s indelible imagery: a lone modernist structure perched atop a mountain of accumulating plastic, isolated and quietly ominous.

Fifteen years later, Plastic Beach feels less like a dystopian fiction and more like a documentary.

More importantly, it severed the last obvious ties to Blur. Gorillaz no longer felt like Albarn’s side project. It was his primary language.

The seven-year gap that followed fractured momentum. When Gorillaz returned with Humanz, the cultural landscape had shifted. Genre was fluid, collaboration was constant. Streaming had flattened taste into mood-based consumption.

Ironically, the world had caught up to Gorillaz.

Albums like Humanz, The Now Now, and Cracker Island delivered flashes of brilliance but often felt less immersive than their predecessors. The collaborators were plentiful, but the conceptual glue sometimes thinned. The records played like loosely curated experiences rather than fully realized worlds.

And yet, even in this era, Gorillaz remained prophetic. Their virtual band model no longer felt like a possibility, it was inevitable. Identity online had become animated, fragmented, and hyper-curated. Virtual influencers and avatar rappers flooded feeds. The boundary  between persona and person had collapsed in the same ways Albarn and Hewlett had sketched decades earlier.

The parody had become reality.

If reinvention once meant rupture, The Mountain (out Feb 27) suggests something subtler: reclamation.

Rather than chasing pop immediacy, Albarn leans back into atmosphere and myth. The record constructs a spiritual topography populated by unreliable gods, fractured harmonies, and transnational soundscapes. Hewlett’s illustrations are once again immersive, accompanied by an animated short film — The Mountain, The Moon Cave, and The Sad God — that expands the album’s narrative beyond the songs themselves.

Inspired by Albarn and Hewlett’s experiences in India, the album folds Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Latin textures into its portrait. Syrian singer Omar Souleyman’s urgent presence on “Damascus.” Argentinian rapper Trueno’s explosive performance on “Manifesto.” Synth-heavy meditations like “Moon Cave.” The dark humour of “God of Lying.” These moments don’t feel ornamental; they feel embedded in the album’s terrain.

Where some post-hiatus records flirted with ritualistic pop structure, The Mountain feels apathetic towards it. Albarn has always been a capable pop writer, but is most compelling when he forgets what pop is supposed to sound like.

In that sense, The Mountain doesn’t represent reinvention as a dramatic career reset. Instead, it’s a return to first principles: world-building, cultural commentary, and borderless collaboration.

And maybe that’s the most radical move left.

What makes Gorillaz singular isn’t simply that they were the first widely successful animated band. It’s that they knew novelty would expire and treated their concept as elastic. The characters aged, the mythology shifted, the politics evolved. The music didn’t depict the world, it absorbed it.

They anticipated virtual identity before social media hardened it. They foreshadowed playlist culture before streaming optimized it. They proved collaboration could be structural rather than ornamental.

Most bands chase relevance. Gorillaz built a universe durable enough to outlast relevance cycles altogether.

Reinvention, in their hands, was never about abandoning the past. It was about reshaping it into the next possible future.