A gloomy and compelling response to escalating tensions and ongoing conflicts, the album painted a grim picture of a depleted, hollow world, addressing the ongoing war in Iraq. The self-titled debut album was followed up in 2005 by Demon Days. Stylistically, Gorillaz may not have represented such a leap for Hewlett, but for Albarn the narrative opened up a new vista of musical opportunity: the chance to move away from Britpop and its sonic limitations to explore an adventurous new palette of sounds. Albarn, meanwhile, spent the decade fronting Blur.
Hewlett, responsible for the visual aesthetic of the group, made his name with cult graphic novel character Tank Girl. The fiction itself sprung from the minds of a pair of nineties icons: Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. When it dropped in 2001, Gorillaz’ self-titled debut album offered a fresh look at what a band could even be. “Get us all idle and fat and lazy, so when the war starts they can smoosh us like bugs.” “Sitting on your ass twiddling your digits is exactly what the robots want,” Russel Hobbs – Gorillaz’ drummer and conduit for the souls of dead rappers – warns me. Radical ideas have become urgent realities. Devices with fantastically positive potential can easily be tweaked into lethal autonomous weapons systems.
Plus, the technology itself is by definition untested our wisest gurus warn us that the artificial intelligence designed to improve our lives may very well take a dim view of flawed human consciousness. Technology lies on the cusp of sweeping us into a brave new post-human world, while conservative ideologies are desperately trying to send us back to the shitty olden-days. Men in Pyongyang and Washington are beating their chests at each other and nuclear war is a real threat once again. Humanz, Gorillaz’ first album for seven years, has arrived at a precarious moment in history. The Gorillaz narrative is pointing to an apocalyptic event.Īsteroids rain from the sky and dancehall ghouls menace the band members, as a hallucinatory dystopia stirs into action once more and 2D, Noodle, Russel and Murdoc return with another album.
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