Learning to love themself

New album Gloria finds Sam Smith testing new waters and exploring queer themes

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On each album to date, Albarn, and his sidekick, illustrator and animator Jamie Hewlett, have created self-contained worlds thick with narrative and colourful imagery, realised through kaleidoscopic pop music.

Like 2010's Plastic Beach, the foundations of Cracker Island lie in a fictional oasis. After the band relocated from their London base at Kong Studios to Silverlake Recording Studios in LA, they formed 'The Last Cult', a religious organisation with weirdness at its heart. In keeping with this, the video for the new album's title track sees the cult perform a ritual under the Hollywood sign. To each of the collaborators, and the cartoon band themselves, Cracker Island means something different. In the band's traditionally esoteric press statements, guitarist Noodle said that the album is "the sound of change and the chorus of the collective", with 2D adding: "The path to Cracker Island isn't easy to find 'cos it's underwater." So far, so strange.