The Mountain — Gorillaz (2026)
Fifteen tracks, eight countries, two decades of tape — and most of the voices on it belong to the dead.
By Rafi Mercer
There is a Hammond organ in a studio off Portobello Road that cannot leave the building. Too fragile to travel. Albarn bought it at auction — lot 105, which is where the Blur song got its name — and it has stayed put ever since. That organ is the operating principle of the whole room. Studio 13 was built by Albarn with Tom Girling and Jason Cox to be as unlike a commercial studio as possible, then filled with about the strangest collection of equipment anyone has assembled. A Wurlitzer teaching keyboard. A kalimba. A bass Stylophone. A children's speech-training toy that became the main sound source on a Massive Attack remix. Nothing in there does the job it was built for. That is the point.
Twenty-five years of that method, and it arrives here.
The ninth Gorillaz album came out on 27 February on their own Kong label. Originally scheduled for March, pulled forward. Look at the recording dates and the shape of the thing gives itself away: 2001 to 2010, then 2024 to 2025. Two windows, fourteen years apart. An archive opened, and something built out of what was already in it.
What was already in it was people who have since gone. Dennis Hopper on the title track. Bobby Womack and Dave Jolicoeur of De La Soul on "The Moon Cave". Tony Allen. Mark E. Smith, bellowing his way through the stillness of "Delirium". This is not a guest list. It is a room with the dead still in it, which is a very different room to be in.
Albarn and Hewlett both lost their fathers in the summer of 2024, while the record was being made, and the album turned toward death, grief and the afterlife. Albarn's own account is plain enough — it contains grief, it's personal, it's meant for everyone. Hewlett described Black Thought coming in to trade bars with Jolicoeur and simply having a conversation with his friend, who is somewhere else. That sentence does more work than most eulogies.
Then India, which is where the sound lives. Mumbai. Jaipur. Rishikesh. Amritsar. Haridwar. The ghats at Varanasi. Anoushka Shankar. The Bangash brothers on sarod. Ajay Prasanna on bansuri. Albarn's reasoning was that making something good requires going somewhere you have never been, rather than sitting in a studio in London or Los Angeles. The man who assembled a room full of instruments in order to use them wrongly, still refusing the correct move in his fifties.
Tony Allen, on "The Hardest Thing", says in Yoruba: "Oh, wake up my dear." Two minutes and eighteen seconds. He had been gone four years when the record came out.
Sixty-six minutes, fifteen songs. It does not reward a shuffle. The sequencing is carrying the argument — grief, then travel, then something that resolves without pretending to be resolution — and if you take tracks out of it you are left holding parts. This is a record for a full side and a closed door. Which is, more or less, the argument this whole publication exists to make.
Uncut gave it ninety and called it Damon's gap year in India, where death has never sounded so joyous. Clash noted that it thrives on restraint and cohesion, with collaboration built into the core rather than bolted on. Thirty thousand units in its opening week, the biggest independent release of the year in the UK, Silver by July, and number seven on the Billboard 200 — their sixth American top ten.
Which brings it back to the organ that cannot leave the room. Some things stay because they are too fragile to move. Some voices stay for the same reason. The record knows the difference between keeping and holding, and it spends an hour on the second one.
Quick Questions
Why does The Mountain feature so many artists who have died?
The album draws on sessions recorded between 2001 and 2010 as well as 2024 and 2025. Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Tony Allen and Mark E. Smith all appear from that earlier archive, and their presence shapes the record's central concern with death and the afterlife.
Where was it recorded?
Studio 13 in London and Devon, plus locations across India including Mumbai, Jaipur, Rishikesh, Varanasi and Amritsar, with further sessions in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.
Is a 2026 release worth playing on a proper system?
Any record whose sequencing carries meaning rewards a full listen on good equipment. Length and running order are doing real work here, which is exactly the condition a listening room is built for.
If you want more records worth an hour and a closed door, subscribe.
More albums in the archive: Tracks & Tales Listening Bar Albums.
