Trump inspires Gorillaz’s album Patrick Ryan
Virtual band channels fears into its comeback
Sans their cartoon counterparts, Gorillaz are no less animated.
The beloved “virtual” band — a high-concept experiment by Blur frontman Damon Albarn and visual artist Jamie Hewlett — returns Friday with its first album in seven years, Humanz. But on a rainy Tuesday night in Brooklyn, tucked away in the back of Rough Trade Records store, there are no traces of their offbeat characters (named 2-D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel), who are typically projected onstage at Gorillaz gigs.
Instead, the spotlight is on Albarn, who transforms the dimly lit venue into a housey dystopian dance party as he plays the politically charged Humanz, with the help of a live band and offstage vocalists. Wielding a keytar on the spiritual Let Me Out, and giddily rapping along to Danny Brown’s Submission verse, he also engages with audience members throughout: taking a hit of one fan’s joint and inviting another to (unsuccessfully) rap Del the Funky Homosapien’s part on crowd-pleaser Clint Eastwood.
If technology allows, Albarn may one day cede the stage to cartoon holograms (as Gorillaz did for their 2006 Grammys performance with Madonna). But for now, “I really enjoy playing,” he says, sitting in the lobby of the Greenwich Hotel earlier that day. “When we did our first North American tour, we played behind a screen and that was torture for me. I could hear and feel the heat of the audience, but I couldn’t see them. I desperately wanted to cut a hole in the screen and stick my head out.”
Fans will see more of the 49year-old singer this summer at festivals Outside Lands and The Meadows, and on Gorillaz’s soldout U.S. tour. Along with higher production values, Albarn says those shows will also include more appearances by artists on
Humanz’s eclectic guest roster, which includes Pusha T, Carly Simon and Grace Jones.
The heavy presence of hot rappers including D.R.A.M. and Vince Staples on the album is not, as headlines have suggested, so Albarn could impress his daughter. (”The idea that I was calling people up so I’d be cool with (her) is ridiculous,” he says. “More fake news.”) Instead, they fit with his vision for what a party record for the apocalypse might sound like — a grim hypothetical inspired largely by President Trump.
When he started writing last January, “I sort of projected to the end of the year, when I knew the record would be finished and I imagined how we’d all feel if he made that progress to the summit,” Albarn says. “It’s not about him, but Gorillaz has always had a dread (in its music) and that was our chosen dreadful destination.” Woeful protest song Hallelujah
Money, written last March, was “the song we played in our imaginary world at his inauguration,” Albarn continues. “If you listen to the lyrics, they’re full of dread.” (“When the morning comes, how will we know we are still human?” 2-D, voiced by Albarn, questions, before British poet Benjamin Clementine makes peace with humanity’s end in spoken word.)
Disillusionment is not unusual terrain for Gorillaz, who addressed concerns about climate change on 2010’s Plastic Beach and the Iraq War on 2005’s De
mon Days, the band’s most commercially successful album.
“I like the juxtaposition of cartoons and all this really quite dreadful subject matter,” Albarn says. “But on this record, the reason it’s called Humanz, is because in the middle of it all, there’s this conversation between men and women. It’s balanced between male and female, and the humans are what we’re going to become, somehow.”
“Gorillaz has always had a dread and that was our chosen dreadful destination.” Damon Albarn