Album deep read
The Mountain Gorillaz
15 Tracks
24 Collaborators
5 Languages
6 In Memoriam
This album began with loss. Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn both lost people close to them within weeks of each other, while travelling back and forth to India. What started as grief became a pilgrimage, and then became a record about the one thing every culture in human history has tried to understand.
01
The origin story
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have been making music together as Gorillaz since 1998. In that time they have built one of the most elaborate fictional universes in pop music -four animated characters, a mythology that spans comic books, short films and concept albums, and a sound that refuses to stay still.
But The Mountain began somewhere deeply personal. Hewlett's mother-in-law fell ill while the family were in Jaipur. He stayed at her side for eight weeks. She passed away in India. It was a devastating time, but through the grief, Hewlett found something unexpected in the country itself -its colour, its openness about mortality, its refusal to look away from the hardest parts of life. He came home and proposed something to Albarn: "We need to go to India together."
Before they could make the trip, both men suffered further loss. Albarn's father passed away. Ten days later, Hewlett's father followed. It is worth pausing here. These were not plot points in an album's backstory. These were people, deeply loved, suddenly gone. What happened next only makes sense if you understand that the grief was real and enormous.
They went to India anyway. They found a country that does not look away from loss the way the west often does -one that walks toward it, names it, builds rituals around it, covers it in colour. What followed was not a traditional period of mourning but something closer to a search, for meaning, for peace, for a framework that could hold what they were feeling. India offered one. And then it gave them an album.
The first loss
Hewlett's mother-in-law falls ill in Jaipur
Hewlett stays at her side for eight weeks. She passes away in India. Through the grief, something unexpected takes root: a deep connection with the country.
The proposal
"We need to go to India together"
Hewlett returns home and tells Albarn they must travel to India together. A creative journey born from the most difficult of circumstances.
Further loss
Both fathers pass away ten days apart
Both men lose their fathers within ten days of each other. The weight of it is hard to overstate. The planned trip to India becomes something more. A pilgrimage.
The journey
India as grief and revelation
Rather than cancel, the pair immerse themselves in India. They encounter Hindu philosophy's relationship with death -not as ending but as transition. A mountain to be climbed.
The making
Recording across four Indian cities and three continents
Sessions in Mumbai, New Delhi, Rajasthan and Varanasi alongside London, Devon, Los Angeles, Miami, Damascus, Ashgabat and New York. The album becomes as geographically sprawling as the question it's trying to answer.
Feb 27, 2026
The Mountain released -independently, on their own label KONG
Their ninth studio album. Their first truly independent release. Debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart. Gorillaz's most personal record, released entirely on their own terms.
02
India as collaborator
The album was not recorded about India. It was recorded in India, with India, shaped by what India sounds like and what India believes. Each city brought something different to the record.
Mumbai
The gateway
Where Gorillaz first arrived -in the lore, via four fake passports. The city's collision of ancient and modern, Bollywood and classical, chaos and ceremony runs through the album's texture.
Playback singers
Varanasi
The city of the dead
The oldest living city in the world. The place where Hindus come to die, believing death here guarantees liberation. Albarn came here specifically. The album's relationship with mortality is inseparable from this city.
Tabla · Bansuri
Rajasthan
The desert and the court
The land of Mughal architecture, folk tradition and sarod music. The Bangash brothers -sarod maestros from a lineage stretching back seven generations -brought the desert into the studio.
Sarod
New Delhi
The classical spine
Where Anoushka Shankar -sitar virtuoso, daughter of Ravi Shankar -added the album's most meditative corners. Classical ragas that carry centuries of spiritual instruction inside their structure.
Sitar · Raga
03
The instruments inside it
Most western listeners have never heard these instruments in the context of a Gorillaz record. Here is what they are, where they come from and what they do to the sound.
01
Bansuri
North India · Bamboo flute · 3,000+ years old
A transverse bamboo flute with seven finger holes. Associated with the god Krishna, who is almost always depicted playing one. Its breathy, slightly unstable tone is what gives The Mountain its most meditative passages. Played by Ajay Prasanna across multiple tracks -the very first sound you hear on the album is his bansuri.
02
Tabla
North India · Paired hand drums · c.1200 CE
Two small drums played together. The black centre of each drum -the syahi -is a layered acoustic invention that allows the tabla to produce perfect pitch and rich harmonics unlike any other percussion instrument in the world. On The Mountain it sits beneath electronic beats without competing with them.
03
Sarod
North India · Plucked string · descended from the Afghan rubab
A fretless string instrument that can slide between notes in a way no fretted instrument can. Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash are seventh-generation sarod players from one of India's most celebrated classical music families. Their presence on this record is a collaboration with a lineage.
04
Sitar
North India · Plucked string · c.1700 CE
Anoushka Shankar -daughter of Ravi Shankar, who introduced the sitar to the Beatles in 1966 -plays across six tracks on The Mountain. The sitar has sympathetic strings that vibrate in resonance without being played, creating a natural shimmer no studio can replicate. That sound underneath the album is physics, not production.
04
The lore layer
पर्वत
Parvat -Mountain -the title hidden in plain sight on the cover
The fictional lore
Four fake passports and a New York business acquaintance of Murdoc
In the official Gorillaz narrative, the band got to India via four fake passports arranged by a mysterious New York contact of Murdoc Niccals. Once in Mumbai, the band turned their backs on international pop stardom and immersed themselves in mystical music-making. The parallel between the fictional journey and the real one is not accidental. It never is with Gorillaz.
The artwork secret
The word on the cover is not "The Mountain"
The album cover features "Parvat" written in Devanagari script -the alphabet used for Hindi, Sanskrit and several other Indian languages. Parvat means mountain. Hewlett made this choice deliberately. You have to go looking for the translation. That act of searching is the album's thesis in miniature.
The hand-drawn resistance
Every frame drawn by hand -a deliberate act against AI
The eight-minute animated short film was made entirely with hand-drawn techniques inspired by classic Disney films like The Jungle Book. Hewlett told the Associated Press: "With the rise of AI art and AI this and AI that, I find it all a bit sickening. It was necessary to show how wonderful something can look when it's made by people." Every frame is an argument.
Film still -The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God -hand-drawn cel animation, The Line studio
The ghosts in the record
Six artists who are no longer with us appear on this album. That was always the plan.
Albarn went through 25 years of Gorillaz recording archives to find unreleased performances from collaborators who had passed away. Their voices were never released in their lifetimes, but they were there, waiting. Dennis Hopper speaks the album's first word, resampled from Demon Days sessions. Bobby Womack and Dave Jolicoeur of De La Soul appear on The Moon Cave. Tony Allen drums on The Hardest Thing. Mark E. Smith surfaces on Delirium. Proof of D12 appears on The Manifesto. Each performance is treated with care, given space, allowed to breathe inside the record.
Albarn put it simply: “It's not nostalgia if it's never been heard before.”
There is a deeper layer here. In the original 1999 Gorillaz manifesto, the character Russel Hobbs was designed as a vessel, a man haunted by the ghost of his best friend Del the Ghost Rapper, who would channel lost musicians through his body. For 25 years that was fiction. On The Mountain, through the theme of reincarnation and six collaborators whose voices live on through this record, Albarn finally made it real. The concept Gorillaz was built on, voices carrying forward beyond a lifetime, took a quarter of a century to fully arrive.
The independence move
Their own label. Their first truly free record.
The Mountain is the first Gorillaz release on KONG -their own label, distributed by Sony subsidiary The Orchard. After 25 years and eight albums with Parlophone, Albarn and Hewlett made this record without a major label in the room. The label is named after Kong Studios -the fictional base of operations for the animated band. As always with Gorillaz, the real and the fictional are the same thing.
The hidden typeface
Zanjeer typography -a Bollywood poster from 1973
The album logo typeface is based on the poster for Zanjeer (1973), Amitabh Bachchan's breakthrough film. A poster for Zanjeer appears in 2-D's Room at Kong Studios -planted in Gorillaz lore years before this album existed. Hewlett was seeding the visual language long before anyone knew there would be a mountain to name.
The protest shirt
Pikachu as Che Guevara
One character wears a shirt depicting Pikachu styled as Che Guevara. The image was inspired by actual footage from Turkish street protests where demonstrators wore the same design. Pop culture as political costume, filtered through Hewlett's eye for the absurd and the sincere happening simultaneously.
The 16-year wait
Damascus is sixteen years old
Originally composed during the Plastic Beach sessions around 2009–2010. It sat unreleased for sixteen years before finding its home on The Mountain. Some songs need the right album to exist before they can be heard.
The release day event
Spotify London Mural Quest
On release day, Gorillaz and Spotify launched hidden QR code murals across London. Each mural contained a code unlocking exclusive content. The fictional band escaped the screen and appeared on the walls of a real city.
The creation myth
The Moon Cave -where all human ideas originate
Track 2 establishes a mythological space: a cave inside the mountain where every human idea was born -from the first ancient tools to artificial intelligence. The Moon Cave functions as the album's creation myth, a cosmology that positions human creativity as something geological, something that has always been here, waiting to be excavated. The cave painting blue of the animated short brings it to life.
05
The voices on the record
24 collaborators. 5 languages. 6 voices carried forward from artists no longer with us. Every one chosen for a reason.
Anoushka Shankar
Sitar virtuoso. Daughter of Ravi Shankar. Appears on six tracks -the most of any collaborator. The album's meditative spine.
The Mountain + 5 more
Asha Bhosle
Legendary Bollywood playback singer. 80+ years old. Has recorded more songs than almost any artist in history. Her presence here is an act of reverence.
The Shadowy Light
Dennis Hopper
Passed away in 2010. His voice, resampled from Demon Days outtakes, speaks the album's opening word. A presence carried forward, not lost.
The Mountain · In memoriam
Yasiin Bey
Formerly Mos Def. One of hip-hop's most philosophical voices. Performed Damascus live at Brian Eno's Together for Palestine concert at Wembley before the album's release.
Damascus
Johnny Marr
The Smiths guitarist. His collision with Indian classical instruments is the album's most unexpected texture -British post-punk meeting North Indian classical in the same room.
4 tracks
Tony Allen
Afrobeat drumming legend. Fela Kuti's longtime collaborator. Passed away in 2020. His drumming lives on through The Hardest Thing, one of six artists whose voices live on through this record.
The Hardest Thing · In memoriam
06
What it's really about
The Mountain operates on three thematic levels simultaneously. Most listeners will catch one. Here are all three.
Layer one
Death as transition
Hindu philosophy does not treat death as an ending -it treats it as a passage. Albarn absorbed this in Varanasi, the city where Hindus go to die, believing liberation awaits. The album is not about grief. It is about what grief pointed toward.
Layer two
The invented gods
Albarn said they added gods of their own imagination alongside real Hindu deities. The Gorillaz characters themselves become mythological figures navigating mortality. The album name was partly inspired by Amber Fort in Jaipur -a real mountain that became a mythological one.
Layer three
The thrill of being alive
The official description calls it "a playlist for a party on the border between this world and whatever happens next." The Mountain is not a sad record. It looked directly at death and came back dancing. The bansuri and tabla and saffron and chaos of India are celebratory. That is the album's most important secret.
Critics have positioned The Mountain as the conclusion of what they call the location trilogy -three Gorillaz albums defined not by genre but by geography. Each album was shaped by a specific place and what that place taught Albarn and Hewlett about being human.
07
Real vs fiction
Gorillaz has always run a real story and a fictional one in parallel. The Mountain is where the two come closest to merging entirely.
What actually happened
Three losses in close succession
Hewlett's mother-in-law passes in Jaipur. Then Albarn's father. Then Hewlett's father ten days later. The grief becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
A spiritual journey through India
Varanasi, Rajasthan, Mumbai, Delhi. Seeking peace with mortality through a culture that faces it directly.
Leaving the major label system
After 25 years, releasing independently on KONG -their own label, their own terms, no compromise.
What the characters did
Four fake passports
The band made it to Mumbai via forged documents arranged by a mysterious New York contact of Murdoc's.
Turning their backs on pop stardom
2-D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel abandon fame to immerse themselves in mystical music-making in India.
Operating from Kong Studios
The fictional base becomes the real label name. The line between the band and the cartoon has never been thinner.
08
The tracklist
Fifteen tracks. Five languages. Six voices from beyond the grave. The full sequence, as it was intended to be heard.
Pink name = artist no longer with us
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Title
Featured artists
1
The Mountain
Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash, Ayaan Ali Bangash
2
The Moon Cave
Asha Puthli, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Jalen Ngonda, Black Thought
3
The Happy Dictator
Sparks
4
The Hardest Thing
Tony Allen
5
Orange County
Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, Anoushka Shankar
6
The God of Lying
IDLES
7
The Empty Dream Machine
Black Thought, Johnny Marr, Anoushka Shankar
8
The Manifesto
Trueno, Proof
9
The Plastic Guru
Johnny Marr, Anoushka Shankar
10
Delirium
Mark E. Smith
11
Damascus
Omar Souleyman, Yasiin Bey
12
The Shadowy Light
Asha Bhosle, Gruff Rhys, Ajay Prasanna, Amaan Ali Bangash, Ayaan Ali Bangash
13
Casablanca
Paul Simonon, Johnny Marr
14
The Sweet Prince
Ajay Prasanna, Johnny Marr, Anoushka Shankar
15
The Sad God
Black Thought, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar
Sources
Consequence interview with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (2026). Rolling Stone India cover story (2026). Dazed interview (2025). Creative Review: Behind the Scenes on The Mountain Artwork (2026). DJ Mag short film feature (2026). Huck Magazine interview (2026). Spotify Newsroom mural quest announcement (2026).
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