Gorillaz

About Gorillaz

Gorillaz started as what might be the most elaborate joke in modern music. Damon Albarn from Blur and artist Jamie Hewlett were roommates in the late 90s, watching MTV and thinking about how manufactured pop was getting. So they made it literal. They created a fictional band of cartoon characters—2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs—complete with elaborate backstories and animated music videos. The twist was that the music turned out to be genuinely good.

Their self-titled debut in 2001 landed differently than anyone expected. "Clint Eastwood" became inescapable, with its hip-hop beats, melodica hook, and Del the Funky Homosapien's verse about sunshine in a bag. "19-2000" was pure pop confection. The whole album worked because Albarn treated it like a real project, not just a concept. He was pulling from hip-hop, dub, rock, and electronic music before that kind of genre-hopping was standard practice.

Demon Days in 2005 is when they went from interesting experiment to something bigger. The album felt darker, more cohesive, and impossibly catchy. "Feel Good Inc." with De La Soul became one of those songs that defined the mid-2000s. "Dirty Harry" had children singing the chorus. "DARE" was built around Shaun Ryder half-singing the word "dare" in the least energetic way possible, and somehow it worked. The whole record managed to sound apocalyptic and playful at the same time.

Then things got complicated. Plastic Beach in 2010 was ambitious, maybe too ambitious. Albarn brought in everyone from Snoop Dogg to Bobby Womack to Lou Reed, recording parts in a studio on a boat. The environmental themes were heavy-handed, but tracks like "On Melancholy Hill" and "Rhinestone Eyes" proved he could still write hooks that stuck. The iPad-recorded The Fall came fast afterward and felt like a comedown, lo-fi and meandering.

They went quiet for a while. When Humanz dropped in 2017, it was overstuffed with guests and felt more like a compilation than an album. The Now Now in 2018 swung the other direction, stripping things back to mostly just Albarn. It was understated and kind of sad, which worked better than it should have.

Song Machine was their pandemic project starting in 2020, releasing tracks episodically with different collaborators. It gave them room to experiment without album-length commitments. Recent stuff like Cracker Island in 2023 features Tame Impala and Thundercat, because of course it does.

At this point, Gorillaz is basically whatever Albarn wants it to be—a framework for collaboration that lets him work across genres without worrying about consistency. The cartoon band concept matters less now than it did, but it freed him to make music without the weight of his own face attached to it. Two decades in, they're still going, still shape-shifting.

Their shows are sprawling multimedia events where the cartoon characters loom behind the band. Crowds are mixed—hip-hop heads, alternative fans, people who just know the singles. The energy shifts between groovy, almost loose moments and genuinely packed dance floor intensity. It feels less like a concert and more like you showed up to watch a band actively not taking themselves seriously.

Known for Clint Eastwood, Feel Good Inc., Humility, Rhinestone Eyes, On Melancholy Hill

See Gorillaz Live