COVER STORY: Gorillaz Look Beyond Mortality

Gorillaz co-founder Damon Albarn looks a bit bleary-eyed as he sits in his home in the U.K. battling a bleak British winter. “It’s very hard to believe that the sun exists at the moment. This is our annual act of faith in existence, really,” he amusedly tells Rolling Stone India. 

You can sense from even offhand comments like that that the artist’s mindspace is quite existential these days. After all, he and fellow creative collaborator Jamie Hewlett have drawn from dread, grief and the joys of life on their ninth studio album The Mountain, out on Feb. 27, 2026 via their own label Kong.

Wearing a black cap and white t-shirt adorned with necklaces (including what looks like a mala), Albarn lightens up at different points of our hour-long conversation. “I feel like Murdoc’s sort of exploring sadhu chic at the moment. Whatever that means,” he says with a smile. 

Picturing the band’s irreverent, skeezy bassist as a wide-eyed, somewhat enlightened ascetic on the ghats of the Ganga is not something any Gorillaz fans would’ve ever imagined. More so for fans in India, this was a crossover that no one saw coming. 

The band’s India lore first kicked off in a 2023 post, in which the virtual members – Murdoc Niccals, 2-D, Noodle and Russel Hobbs – escaped the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) by getting fake passports and jetting off to Mumbai. 

The journey that Albarn and Hewlett undertook to create The Mountain – reflected across the virtual band’s mythology over 15 tracks – was one beset with loss and reflection. At the end of 2022, Hewlett was rushing to get his Indian visa and fly to Jaipur from Serbia after his mother-in-law suffered a stroke and went into a coma while she was in the capital of the desert state of Rajasthan with his wife. 

They ended up spending two months in Jaipur, trying to find a way to fly her home to Paris, even as ICU visits and bouts of infections continued. “It was a very, very traumatic experience, as I’m sure you can imagine, being in a different part of the world with a family member in a coma, trying to get them home. But despite that, I fell in love with Jaipur,” Hewlett admits. 

“I said to Damon, if we can make an album about death that makes people feel less afraid of the concept of it, wouldn’t that be an amazing gift?”

Jamie Hewlett

Wearing a faded blue t-shirt and a backwards black cap, he smiles often when I ask him about India and the impression it left on him. “I mean, I should have come back saying, ‘I’m never going to India again after this experience.’ But of course, it was nothing to do with India. It was just that it happened there,” he says. 

When he got back to London, he spoke to Albarn. “I told him we have to go to India to do a Gorillaz project. And he was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’” 

They then took their first trip to India together in May 2023, “just discovering and traveling around, trying to imbibe as much of the culture and have as many experiences as possible,” according to Hewlett. 

Both Albarn and Hewlett have some familiarity with India — as you might expect of British artists, given that generations of Indian diaspora made the U.K. their home in the aftermath of colonial rule. Out in Leytonstone in East London, where Albarn grew up and went on to gain worldwide fame with rock band Blur, he says they lived next to an Indian family and his father often collected and played Indian classical music at home. “My dad used to play me Ravi Shankar [records] from [when I was] a baby […] I felt very at home when I arrived in Mumbai,” Albarn recalls from his first visit. 

There wasn’t a clear theme just yet. After returning to London to further pursue this newfound direction, tragedy struck again when Albarn’s father passed away. Ten days later, Hewlett lost his father. In the coming months, he also lost his mother-in-law, following a prolonged period of illness. The India experience still fresh in their minds, the idea for the next Gorillaz album had taken root – it was about death and the loss of loved ones, not from the “Western perspective” but through the more comforting lens of reincarnation they learnt from Eastern philosophies like Hinduism. Hewlett says, “I said to Damon, if we can make an album about death that makes people feel less afraid of the concept of it, wouldn’t that be an amazing gift?” 

Considering Gorillaz’s affinity for globe-trotting, surreal adventures, and collabs to back them up, it’s easy to imagine them ending up in India. But not like this. When you hear the opening title track, anchored by Ajay Prasanna’s transportive flute, Anoushka Shankar’s sitar and Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash’s sarod, you immediately get the impression that The Mountain is rooted in something quite real for a virtual band. 

“I was going to get there at some point,” Albarn says, pointing out how Gorillaz, as well as his other standalone projects, have often drawn from music in African countries like Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Morocco and Congo. “I’ve worked in Damascus, Syria and Algeria […] These journeys don’t start for no reason. There’s a lot of emotional energy that builds up before you embark on a journey like the one that The Mountain depicts,” he explains.

Hewlett, for his part, reels off how many places he’s traveled to within India, including New Delhi, Amritsar, Mumbai, Rishikesh and an ayurvedic retreat in Kerala. He and Albarn also later visited Varanasi to scatter the vocalist’s father’s ashes in the Ganga river.

He underscores that it wasn’t like they’d just “suddenly discovered spirituality” in the Eat Pray Love way that’s been romanticized. “I’ve been studying it and trying to immerse myself in it all over the world, because it’s all connected. You feel that very strongly somewhere like Varanasi, when you’re witnessing a burning, the dispersal of energy and the renewal of that energy somewhere else, the cycle of life… the wheel. You feel it very strongly,” Albarn says.

In Rajasthan, the immersion became more music-driven. Here, he heard a great deal of folk music, including a “single-string violin” being played at Amber Fort in Jaipur, and recorded parts that were later adapted into Gorillaz music on The Mountain. “Some tunes that are really famous are probably unrecognizable from how they started hundreds of years ago. I think for me, that was very important: to have something that I could really emotionally own, even though it’s not mine. I felt I could contribute to it.” 

Visually, the Gorillaz gets even more colorful and immersed in Indian motifs, from Russel dressed like a member of the Hindu Jea Band Jaipur and Murdoc levitating like an ascetic on the river ghat, to song titles being translated into Hindi and written in the Devnagari script while being released as singles. In another promo shot, there’s a multi-headed figure looming over the band.

Hewlett says he intended to be respectful in his depictions, even though he just wanted to draw the Hindu gods. Through conversations with a tattoo artist he met in Mumbai, a team in India, and books he researched, the artist says he’s been “steered in the right direction.” The photographs that became the backdrop for the artwork came from Blair Brown, who joined Hewlett and Albarn on their India visits, and took “thousands” of photographs. 

Both Albarn and Hewlett acknowledge that The Mountain is the first time in a long time they were “truly in alignment.” The vocalist pegs their 2010 album Plastic Beach as the last time. Hewlett says they had “drifted a bit as a creative duo.” He adds, “I think this album really brought us very close to one another, and we realized that that was really the necessary ingredient to making a strong, good album. India brought us back together.” Albarn adds, “It’s great when a friendship can manifest itself in a creative outpouring as well.” 

On hearing Albarn sing the lyrics “I don’t know anything that feels like this” in his distinct plaintiveness on “Casablanca,” Hewlett says it moved him to tears in the studio. “I’m like, ‘What’s going on? I never cry. I’m feeling very emotional at the moment, I suddenly feel lots of love for everybody.’” 

For anyone who discovered Gorillaz through era-defining albums like Demon Days in 2005 and Plastic Beach in 2010, The Mountain is a return to that powerful, otherworldly storytelling they aced as a virtual band first and foremost. 

There are ruminations on the nature of life on “The Moon Cave,” which shimmers with a disco groove, but also features lyrics about childhood fears that could lead to cry-dancing. “The Happy Dictator” was inspired in part by “Trumpian America” but also Albarn’s travels to Turkmenistan and North Korea. Between conscious album cuts like “The God of Lying” and “The Plastic Guru,” there’s the whistled bittersweetness of “Orange County” and “The Hardest Thing,” which take you straight to the depths of loss. There’s a balance of both on “The Manifesto,” a buoyant track that confronts death with acerbic rap. “The Shadowy Light,” which Albarn wrote in the days after his father’s death, brims with Gorillaz’s inimitable melancholy but also a sense of acceptance about the ways of the world. The album’s closing track, “The Sad God,” also addresses abandonment and death from the perspective of an “outgoing deity” that Hewlett likens to a god that has given up on mankind. “He’s basically saying, ‘What have you done? I gave you all of these wonderful opportunities, and you turned it into negative ideas,’” Hewlett explains. 

For sonic authenticity, Gorillaz used their superpower of enlisting some of the best artists from around the world. Adding another layer to a concept album around death, The Mountain has several posthumous features from Dennis Hopper (who lent his voice to Demon Days track “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” and now appears on the title track), Bobby Womack and Dave Jolicoeur (“The Moon Cave”), Proof on “The Manifesto,” Tony Allen on “The Hardest Thing” and Mark E. Smith on “Delirium.” Albarn says, “It works beautifully within the idea of reincarnation.” 

Recording at studios in Mumbai, New Delhi, Jaipur, and other parts of the world, The Mountain places the voices of Indian and Indian-origin artists within Gorillaz’s global sonic universe. There are the likes of legendary singer Asha Bhosle (singing a Hindi hook “Majhi Re Majhi” written by lyricist Kausar Munir on “The Shadowy Light”) and disco/jazz stalwart Asha Puthli (“The Moon Cave”). 

Bhosle, who has sung over 15,000 songs, tells Rolling Stone India, “I was hesitant to work on this album of Gorillaz, but when I heard the music track and the lyrics, it triggered something deep inside me. This was not one of those everyday kinds of songs. The lyrics held deep meaning, and I felt moved enough to accept this assignment.” It’s led to one of the most poignant moments on the album.

Puthli, for her part, credits her manager Sweety Kapoor — who was also the music consultant and supervisor for Indian artists on The Mountain — for bringing her aboard the project. She adds, “Damon and I spoke about his father, loss, grief, what comes after death, non-linear time, consciousness, the idea of oneness and spiritual journeys. We wrote lyrics in English, with touches of Hindi and Sanskrit. The process was fully collaborative, from writing to improvising in the booth.” 

Shankar, who contributes throughout the album, was also brought in via Kapoor. “Damon just spent the day with me, and we went through all the songs and just spent a whole day recording across the whole album, and it was really open and fun. Just my favorite kind of recording – really focused but really creative,” she says of the process. She points out that while the opening title track might sound very “Indian,” the feted sitarist-composer clarifies that it’s not necessarily based on a raga. “The music is very inherently them [Gorillaz]. The melodies are being played with inflections and improvisations that are a bit more Indian-influenced in nature, because of who’s playing it in those moments.” 

Having the celebrated sitarist on a Gorillaz record was also something of a full-circle moment for Albarn, who grew up listening to the music of her father, sitar legend Pandit Ravi Shankar. “I reckon I listened to Ravi Shankar before I listened to the Beatles,” he says.

“The mountain is a metaphor for life.”

Jamie Hewlett

Initially recording in New Delhi, flautist Prasanna says he felt an “emotional connection” right from the first session. He adds, “They called me to Mumbai after a few months to record more parts, and yet again, I played along as they smiled with tears of joy. I will cherish these initial recording memories forever!” Calling the collaboration “extremely rare,” the seasoned flautist also chose to play raga Dhani and raga Malkauns in “The Manifesto.” 

At one point, the feelers they were putting out for Indian artists almost led to being in the same room with some “Westernized Indian pop stars,” but Albarn says it wasn’t what they were looking to do. “We didn’t come to India to break the Indian market. We came to India because we’re really interested in learning something and being creative within that learning process,” he clarifies. 

Of course, true to form, Gorillaz also brought their own picks of globally-renowned artists into the mix, over and above the Indian influence. The Roots rapper Black Thought charges up three tracks, even name-dropping Asha Bhosle singing her 1971 R.D. Burman-composed hit “Dum Maro Dum” on “The Empty Dream Machine.” Syrian singing star Omar Souleyman adds Arabic heft alongside Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) on “Damascus,” guitarist Johnny Marr adds riffs and melodies on a few tracks, The Clash’s Paul Simonon lends backing vocals on “Casablanca,” and rock act Idles’ Joe Talbot’s vocals cut through on “The God of Lying.” 

Among the youngest and brightest stars on The Mountain are Argentinian producer Bizarrap and rapper Trueno. Bizarrap delivers a cheery beat that contrasts with the gut-wrenching lyrics of “Orange County,” along with an additional production credit for “The Moon Cave.” Meanwhile, Trueno proves himself on “The Manifesto,” riding the playful music that surprisingly has percussive kartal bells. Albarn says, “South American music and Indian music… that’s a vein in the mind yet to be kind of discovered. A lot of the percussion in Indian music is quite similar to the percussion in things like Samba.” 

The Mountain becomes an album that takes us around the world, with India as the starting point, as Gorillaz scale new peaks in their journey of self-discovery. If you haven’t seen any music videos yet, it’s because Hewlett is prepping an eight-minute short film that is entirely based off hand-drawn illustrations. It will feature three songs and essentially provide “a condensed explanation about what is being sung about on this record, which is essentially the story of life.”  The artist adds, “The mountain is a metaphor for life. The bottom of the mountain is vast, with many green jungles and many paths, many opportunities, and the higher you climb, the more narrow it becomes. And if you make it to the top of the mountain, what is beyond that? And that is essentially reincarnation.” 

Although Gorillaz have been rendered in everything from 2D to CGI to 3D live-action (remember the 2006 Grammy awards?), AR and VR, Hewlett took the painstaking route of hand-drawn illustration. He says he wanted to go back to the way animation existed in the Fifties and Sixties. “I watched The Jungle Book a few times, and a lot of old animated movies. I even found some weird Indian [animated] stuff online and I just love it. I love the fact that that’s made by people,” he says. When asked to draw a Gorillaz image for the Rolling Stone India cover, Hewlett transported 2-D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel deep into the forests of India, inspired by beloved 19th-century Rudyard Kipling stories that are themselves rooted in ancient Indian fables such as the Panchatantra.

“It’s just the beginning and I truly look forward to the experience of bringing a band like Gorillaz to India” 

Damon Albarn

It’s a “mild statement” against the proliferation of AI-generated images and art as well. Hewlett invokes the example of his son using ChatGPT and telling him it was an easy tool. “You don’t want it to be easy. You need to do it for yourself. Otherwise, we’re gonna reach a point where all you do is sit on the sofa pressing buttons,” he says with a laugh. 

Along with the album and short film, there’s an additional House of Kong exhibition in Los Angeles, two shows in the U.S., and an extensive Europe tour in the books. Albarn says, “I’ve got to give up a year of home life to do this tour, which is fine. There are certain sacrifices that you make as you get older, because time isn’t infinite, is it? You just become more sensitive. It doesn’t really mean I’ve changed my idea of what I should be doing, but I suppose maybe I treasure every moment more.” Much like the album, Albarn circles back to the idea of faith in existence that he mentioned at the start of our conversation.

For fans in India who were already freaking out at the thought of Gorillaz pulling up to this part of the world when the album was announced, Albarn and Hewlett are trying to make shows in India happen as well. Albarn says, “It [the project] is all geared towards arriving in India at some point. That’s the whole point of it – so that we can play some wonderful gigs in India. It’s just the beginning and I truly look forward to the experience of bringing a band like Gorillaz to India. 

Hewlett adds, “Our dream is to do a tour of India. We’re in the process of sorting that out, but you know that’s not always easy in India.” He pauses and says with a laugh, “Everything is in the hands of the gods, which I love.” 

25 years into their acclaimed career as Gorillaz, making The Mountain has strengthened the bond between the co-creators. It can only mean that after a few albums which played out more like a compilation of tracks than a concept album, they are finally on the same page and moving forward. Hewlett says they’ve already begun plotting the next record, which will be Gorillaz’s 10th album. “I saw Damon the other day, and we had a discussion about the next album that we’re already thinking of, and we already have an idea for, but that, again, will involve going somewhere that we’ve never been and having an experience,” Hewlett says. 

Until then, The Mountain – with all its summits and slopes – will take listeners on a journey like few other albums. 

Cover Credits:

Artwork: Gorillaz

Executive Editor: Shamani Joshi

Photographers: Blair Brown and Reuben Bastienne-Lewis

Art Director: Nandkishor Sawant

Special Thanks Robach Music Group (Gorillaz’ India Marketing Partner)