Pochette de « The Mountain » — Gorillaz / Kong Studios
Some records feel like maps of the world. ‘The Mountain’, Gorillaz’s ninth studio album, is clearly one of them. Released in February 2026 on the band’s own label, Kong, it unfurls fifteen tracks recorded between London, Mumbai, New York and beyond, in a whirlwind of languages and influences. Hailed as one of the year’s peaks by critics, the record confirms what many had long suspected: behind its cartoon characters, Gorillaz remains one of the boldest laboratories in popular music. It is our album of the week, and it deserves far more than a distracted listen.
A world-record signed Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett
Since 2001, the duo of musician Damon Albarn and illustrator Jamie Hewlett has made Gorillaz a one-of-a-kind object: a virtual band fronting one of the most restlessly curious minds in British pop. ‘The Mountain’ pushes that collaborative logic to the extreme. Rather than locking himself in a studio, Albarn carried the project around the world, inviting onto these fifteen tracks a teeming cast of Indian classical instrumentalists, soul, rap and pop voices, and long-time accomplices.
You will hear the hypnotic strings of Anoushka Shankar, the pop eccentricity of the Mael brothers of Sparks, the razor pen of rapper Black Thought and the drive of Argentine producer Bizarrap. All that abundance could have curdled into a patchwork; it never does. Albarn holds the wheel with a sense of narrative and mood that turns this geographic leap into a coherent, melancholy and often moving voyage.
‘The Mountain’ also plays out as a journey through languages. English rubs shoulders with Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and Yoruba, in a blend that is anything but surface exotica. Traditional Indian instruments, percussion and electronic textures are in constant dialogue, so you drift from a Mumbai side street to a London club without ever losing the thread. True to his method, Albarn starts from minimal loops and moods and lets the guests inhabit, colour and bend them. The result sounds less like a compilation of features than a conversation between many voices.
The key track: ‘The Mountain’ and its animated film
At the heart of the project is its title track, extended by an eight-minute animated short titled ‘The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God’. Hand-drawn by Jamie Hewlett and his team as an open homage to the golden age of 1960s Disney animation, the film is far more than a mere clip: it is a visual fable that distills the album’s spirit, between spiritual quest, dark humour and existential vertigo. Rarely has Gorillaz made image and music speak to each other so closely.
Carried by traditional Indian instruments and an almost symphonic build, the track sums up the record’s approach: take a simple motif and carry it far, high, up to the summit its title promises. It is ambitious, sometimes demanding, but always guided by sincere emotion. You can measure the distance travelled since the instant hits of the early days: Gorillaz has nothing left to prove when it comes to singles, and now chooses depth over efficiency.
A second gem: ‘The Speak It Mountains’
If the title track impresses with its scale, ‘The Speak It Mountains’ wins you over with the way it keeps the listener in balance. The song moves on a muffled groove, lets the silences breathe and distills the bittersweet melancholy that has always been the band’s trademark. It is the kind of track that does not grab you at first, but settles in and never leaves.
That is the real strength of ‘The Mountain’: behind its prestigious guests and its world-record ambition, the album never forgets the song, the hook, the bare emotion. Every listen reveals a detail, a voice, an arrangement missed the time before. This is a record that rewards patience and repeat plays, against the logic of the disposable hit.
A critical reception at the summit
On release, ‘The Mountain’ quickly won everyone over. Review aggregators pushed it to the very top of their year-end rankings, praising its ambition, generosity and coherence at once. In an industry often obsessed with short formats and instant streaming performance, that critical success carries a signal: audiences and press are still capable of rewarding a demanding work conceived as a whole. For a band about to mark twenty-five years, it is a rare achievement, that of a project still reinventing itself without repeating.
It also slots neatly into a discography built on reinvention, from the dub-pop of the debut to the star-studded pop of ‘Plastic Beach’. Where those records chased a sound, ‘The Mountain’ chases a place, or rather many places at once, and turns that restlessness into its greatest strength. It is the sound of a band that could easily coast on nostalgia choosing, instead, to keep climbing.
An album to hear in full
‘The Mountain’ is not a record to cherry-pick. It is best savoured in order, like a story, from first track to last. That coherence, that will to offer a work rather than a collection of singles, no doubt explains the exceptional critical welcome that placed it atop the year’s charts. At a time when music is so often consumed one track at a time, Gorillaz is a reminder of the power of the album as a format in its own right.
Anyone who enjoyed our previous picks will find here that same taste for records that take risks. ‘The Mountain’ is not the most immediate Gorillaz album, but it may well be one of their deepest. A summit, in every sense, worth taking the time to climb.
