When Gorillaz' upcoming album 'The Mountain' leaked, everyone assumed it meant official news was going to be coming soon. I'm not sure anyone thought it'd be literally the day after, though.
Yes, it's true: Gorillaz has officially entered another album cycle. Expect a lot of Jamie Hewlett art of the band's four cartoon members doing nothing in particular and a few drip-fed singles over the next seven months until the album's release in March 2026. The first of these is 'The Happy Dictator', which features both venerable pop duo Sparks and the distinctly Indian flavor indicated in those aforementioned leaks.
And — if I can be real for a second — it's very, very good, which is a bit of an oddity for Gorillaz nowadays.
After the last couple Gorillaz records were just sort of about nothing, it's really refreshing to hear material from them that returns to their more political commentary-oriented roots, even if it's sonically quite different. The call-and-response structure with Sparks singer Russell Mael and the relentlessly upbeat, almost bouncy instrumentation work wonders for reinforcing the horror in the lyrics and the overarching story of a dictator who bans bad news to preserve his own image. Sound familiar?
It's good. It's really good. I almost hate that I've gone from "another Gorillaz record, meh" to "give me the rest of the album now," because now I'm locked into that seven-month wait.
