Gorillaz Look Beyond Mortality

HOW DAMON ALBARN AND JAMIE HEWLETT GREW CLOSER TOGETHER IN GRIEF AND EMERGED WITH THE BAND'S MOST POWERFUL ALBUM

- By ANURAG TAGAT • Artwork by GORILLAZ

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 Rajasthan with his wife.