Following the 2023 release of Cracker Island, my obsession with Gorillaz waned a little bit. To me, the album felt quite lacklustre: I enjoyed the hype around the new music and looked over the more disagreeable aspects of its rollout, but with hindsight there wasn’t anything in the album that made it stick for me. So when The Mountain was announced last summer, I brought this skepticism forward.
Luckily, this one is quite different.
Starting with the eponymous track The Mountain, listeners are eased so beautifully into the rest of the album, especially with its transition into The Moon Cave feeling like the ‘return to form’ the band needed with a more Plastic Beach sound.
One concern that I have about a couple of tracks in the album – something that its opener hints at – is that while the instrumentals and production of the album are sonically spectacular, there are points where tracks inch into being too long and repetitive where you get a little bored listening to them. Now, this isn’t directly tied to track lengths but rather the lack of change within them. Luckily, The Moon Cave breaks this before the opener reaches this point fully, though the following four tracks – all released as singles – don’t have much novelty to them, especially for those that have spent months on end listening to these. Really, the band could stand to release fewer singles and shorten the rollout of new records.
My personal rule is to try not to listen to album singles much before a release, meaning I gain more of an appreciation for singles I otherwise didn’t like. This was the case with The Hardest Thing. My issues with the song when it was initially released with Orange County again stemmed from the repetition within the two together, so listening to these more clearly separated to review made me realise just how much I like the track. However, The Empty Dream Machine brought this disinterest back: with its nearly 6-minute runtime, it’s a chilled halfway mark for the album, but could definitely stand to be a bit shorter.
The opposite’s true for The Manifesto, where you barely notice its 7-minute track length. Shifting between rhythmic percussion you can’t help but dance to, an incredibly catchy chorus and explosive rap from both Proof and Trueno, I have no notes. The Plastic Guru is an easy skip for me, but Delirium and its feature from Mark E. Smith is incredibly reminiscent of Glitter Freeze, and the only instance on this album where I can mark a clear improvement from this earlier phase as this is a lot more enjoyable than its spiritual ancestor. Damascus I already loved as a single and love even more in the context of the album, especially when skipping The Plastic Guru on re-listens as these three tracks are probably the best on the entire album.
Furthermore, The Shadowy Light using Hindi is a nice explicit nod to the Indian influences that shape the record. However, these final few tracks blend together quite a bit for me. The Sad God definitely ties the album together as its closer. It re-employs motifs from the opener but in a way that feels a lot less overused as different instruments use it throughout. It feels quite like a lullaby, which is apt to end on, and loops nicely back into the start.
So, would I say this is Gorillaz’ best album? Far from it, but there’s definitely a nostalgia towards their earlier sound that they pushed a lot in their album rollout. The Mountain feels like it’s trying to bring back the glory days of Plastic Beach, with the second half of the record in particular hits this pretty close to the mark.
