Since their 2001 debut, Gorillaz have become the most successful virtual band ever. Created by Damon Albarn and animator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz features four animated characters and has collaborated with big names like De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Stevie Nicks, Tame Impala, Lou Reed, and Johnny Marr, and even saw Albarn bury the Britpop hatchet with Noel Gallagher.
Their album 'Demon Days' is regarded as a modern classic, and the band won a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for 'Feel Good Inc.' along with multiple BRIT Award nominations, setting new standards and breaking records in music history.
Gorillaz stand out for fearless experimentation, blending styles from hip-hop to synth-driven dreamscapes. Their debut single 'Clint Eastwood' (2001) redefined modern music. Songs like 'Feel Good Inc.' with its infectious bassline and rap interlude, 'DARE' with pulsating dance beats, and 'On Melancholy Hill' with a dreamy synth-pop vibe, each spotlight the band's genre-melding talent. 'Stylo,' merging soul and electronica with Bobby Womack, and the reggae-inspired 'Tomorrow Comes Today' further show Gorillaz's constant reinvention.
Frustration with typical bands inspired Gorillaz. Damon Albarn, weary of Blur, sought creative freedom, while Jamie Hewlett wanted a new artistic challenge after his comic book successes. Their friendship and discussions about the music industry led them to create an animated group blending visuals, storytelling, and music. They aimed to satirise pop culture with cartoon alter egos, drawing from classic animation, 1990s MTV, and underground art. The project let Albarn escape Britpop and experiment with hip-hop, electronics, and dub, while Hewlett brought the band to life, resulting in multi-million-selling albums and global recognition.
Narrowing down my top 10 Gorillaz songs was tough, but here it is.
The lead single from Gorillaz’s ninth studio album, ‘The Mountain’, ‘The Happy Dictator’ is a chipper synthpop track with a Broadway musical feel, featuring American art pop duo Sparks. The song was inspired by Albarn’s trip to Turkmenistan with his daughter Missy, where he learned of dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, a ruler who decreed that his citizens should think only happy thoughts and banned all bad news. As Albarn put it on BBC Radio 1: “There’s a degree of satire, but it’s one of those things that you can sort of imagine people singing back at you and it being quite a joyful experience even though the origins of it are quite sinister and dark.”
Musically, the track opens with a lilting introduction from Sparks vocalist Russell Mael, before a beat drop breaks it open into an electronic backing; shimmering synths, a jumpy rhythm, and the Mael brothers’ operatic vocals contrasting sharply with Albarn’s flat, haunting 2-D delivery. The repeated refrain "Oh, what a happy land we live in" functions almost like state propaganda; an endless reassurance that all is well, even as the imagery surrounding it hints at emptiness and collapse.
The title itself is a masterful oxymoron: a dictator is, by definition, a figure of oppression and control, yet prefixing it with ‘happy’ points to a regime that maintains power not through terror, but through the manufactured consent of a sedated populace.
The collaboration was first hinted at in May 2025, when Sparks posted a photo with Damon Albarn at Studio 13, and the track was officially released on 11 September 2025 alongside the announcement of ‘The Mountain’. The visualiser for the song also drew on cultural references; Murdoc’s pose with a globe at the start is directly inspired by a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film ‘The Great Dictator’.
Although a fairly recent entry into the Gorillaz discography, it's the band at their pop best. As the opening chapter to their finest album since 'Plastic Beach', this song simply had to make the list.
The lead single from ‘Plastic Beach’ (2010), Gorillaz’s third studio album, ‘Stylo’ is one of the most distinctive tracks in their catalogue; a deep, hypnotic groove built on cyclical synths and a monolithic beat, with soul legend Bobby Womack delivering a powerhouse chorus and rapper Mos Def closing things out with a short verse.
The story behind Womack’s involvement is one of the best in Gorillaz folklore. He knew nothing about the band and was initially unsure about the collaboration; it was his daughter who convinced him to take the call. Told simply to sing whatever was on his mind, Womack spent an hour in the studio going, in his own words, "crazy about love and politics, getting it off my chest."
It was reportedly the first recording he had made in nearly two decades, and Albarn described it as an honour to have him on the track. The president of Parlophone summed up the song’s energy well, calling it "a dark, twisted track that sounds like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on MDMA."
Lyrically, the song carries the environmental themes running throughout ‘Plastic Beach’; 2-D’s repeated refrain of ‘coming on to the overload’ captures the sense of a world stretched to its limits. The music video, directed by Jamie Hewlett, leans into that tension with a Mad Max-style car chase through a Californian desert, with Murdoc, 2-D, and android Noodle being pursued by a bounty hunter played by Bruce Willis.
The video was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd Grammy Awards in 2011, losing out to Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’. It also connects directly to the next track on the album; the Camaro runs off the road into the ocean at the end of the video, turning into a shark-shaped submarine and swimming out of view, leading straight into the opening of the ‘On Melancholy Hill’ video.
There are a couple of fascinating footnotes to the song’s history. Barry Gibb was originally set to feature on the track, but had to pull out due to an ear infection; Womack stepped in and, arguably, made the song what it is.
Mos Def, who appears on the album as an animated character named ‘Sun Moon Stars’, was kept largely in the background, contributing a short closing verse; described by one reviewer as a sweet but unfortunately brief cameo. Shortly after release, reggae singer Eddy Grant claimed the song bore similarities to his 1983 track ‘Time Warp’ and began consulting lawyers, though the matter was handled privately between the two parties.
Womack went on to tour with Gorillaz for the entire Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour in 2010, performing the song live night after night. After his passing in 2014, his recorded vocals have been shown on screen during live performances in tribute, a mark of how much his contribution meant to the band.
The ninth track on ‘The Mountain’, ‘The Plastic Guru’, is a compact, meditative piece that fuses Marr’s jangly guitar edges with Shankar’s intricate sitar work; the result sits somewhere between indie-electronica and Indian classical music, with Albarn’s melodies floating quietly over the top. At just over three minutes, it is one of the shorter tracks on the album, but it makes its point with precision, the sparse arrangement giving each instrument room to breathe.
The contrast between Marr’s distinctly British rock sensibility and Shankar’s classical Indian phrasing is what gives the track its unusual texture; two sounds that have no obvious reason to sit together, yet feel entirely natural in the same space. There is a brightness to it that sits slightly apart from the heavier, grief-laden weight of much of the album; the song carries its critique of false enlightenment with a lightness of touch, almost cheerful in its delivery, which makes the central question it poses all the more unsettling.
The two collaborators bring very different worlds to the track. Johnny Marr is best known as the guitarist and co-founder of The Smiths, widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in British rock history; his signature jangly sound defined a generation of alternative music. Anoushka Shankar is a British-American sitar player and the daughter of legendary sitar maestro Ravi Shankar; she has received fourteen Grammy nominations and was the first musician of Indian origin to perform live at the ceremony. On ‘The Mountain’, she is the most featured artist in Gorillaz’ history, appearing on seven tracks in total.
For Albarn, working with Anoushka carried a deeply personal resonance. His father had introduced him to Indian classical music from a very early age; as he told Rolling Stone UK: "I probably listened to Ravi Shankar before I listened to The Beatles when I was a kid." He has described Indian classical music as the soundtrack of his early childhood, the music his parents would put on when they had friends over.
Decades later, he found himself in the studio improvising with Ravi Shankar’s daughter, a moment he described as feeling like meeting a kindred spirit. "I felt very attuned with her,’ he said, ‘and I suppose it must be just the vicinity of that vibration in my early childhood." Alabrn lost his father before the recording of this album, as did Hewlett. This nod back to his childhood felt like a real full-circle moment for the frontman.
Shankar spent a day recording freely across the whole album with Albarn, with the session described as open and improvisational; her sitar was ultimately woven into 7 tracks.
Taken from ‘Plastic Beach’ (2010), ‘Rhinestone Eyes’ is one of Gorillaz’s most lyrically rich, thematically dense tracks. It is a brooding, synth-driven slow-burner with moody beats, washed-out textures, and Albarn’s detached vocals. The title, referencing imitation diamonds, sets the tone as a metaphor throughout the album’s critique of artificiality, consumerism, and a world disconnected from reality.
The song explores the environmental and social themes of ‘Plastic Beach’. The opening lines cast 2-D as “a scary gargoyle on a tower, that you made with plastic power,” symbolising distortion by an artificial world. The image of “factories far away” addresses unseen mass production, while “the waves are rising for this time of year, and nobody knows what to do with the heat” signals climate anxiety. The song works as a protest, a meditation on disconnection, and a parable about consumer culture and lost authenticity.
Among the tracks on ‘Plastic Beach’, ‘Rhinestone Eyes’ stands out as perhaps the most effective at exploring the album’s environmental and social themes, with a rare lyrical precision. The opening lines cast 2-D as “a scary gargoyle on a tower, that you made with plastic power,” symbolising a person distorted and hardened by an artificial world. The image of “rhinestone eyes are like factories far away” fuses the personal with the industrial: the person being addressed looks bright and attractive on the surface, but behind those eyes is the cold, mechanical churn of unseen mass production. The line “the paralytic dreams that we all seem to keep drive on engines till they weep” extends this further, suggesting that humanity’s hopes and ambitions have been co-opted by the same industrial machinery, running on fumes until they break down. “The waves are rising for this time of year, and nobody knows what to do with the heat” signals climate anxiety in the plainest possible terms: a world warming beyond anyone’s control, with no plan and no escape. Later, the closing verse sharpens this into something even more ominous: “helicopters fly over the beach, same time every day, same routine, clear target in the summer when skies are blue,” evoking surveillance, military routine, and the creeping normalisation of threat.
The song serves as both a protest and a meditation on disconnection, and a parable about consumer culture and lost authenticity. As one reading of the song puts it, its power comes from staying unspecific: “Rhinestone Eyes” can be read as a protest song, a breakup song, a parable about the internet and consumer culture, or all of these at once.
Despite its popularity, ‘Rhinestone Eyes’ was never properly released as a single. It was scheduled as the album’s fourth single, with promo CDs sent to US radio, but was pulled in favour of the non-album single ‘Doncamatic’. The full music video was also cancelled after EMI refused to finance it due to ‘Plastic Beach’ ’s commercial performance and the previous singles’ chart positions, as confirmed by Jamie Hewlett.
Instead, a storyboard film was posted to the band’s YouTube channel in October 2010, showing all four band members reuniting on Plastic Beach for a climactic battle, which quickly became a fan favourite. Years later, South African animator Richard Van As spent six years animating the storyboard before releasing it in 2017 to acclaim. Gorillaz acknowledged the work positively, and the video now has nearly 20 million views, further cementing its popularity.
Live, the song debuted at the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth on 21 March 2010 and went on to feature in every show on the Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour, including a memorable performance on the Late Show with David Letterman. In addition, it appeared on the FIFA 11 soundtrack and has remained a setlist staple, even featuring on the 2026 Mountain Tour. Incidentally, the song’s working title was ‘Stink Fish’.
The third single and fifth track from ‘Demon Days’ (2005), ‘Dirty Harry’ is among Gorillaz’s most politically direct songs: a blunt, unflinching anti-war statement set to children’s voices, funk grooves, and Albarn’s muted vocals. Albarn called it simply “an anti-war song.” This time, the message is unmistakable.
The song originated as ‘I Need a Gun,’ a demo Albarn wrote during Blur’s 2003 Think Tank tour and later included on his Democrazy EP. ‘Dirty Harry’ is considered the track that set ‘Demon Days’s direction, moving it away from its working title ‘Reject False Icons’ toward the socially conscious album it became.
When Albarn replaced longtime collaborator Dan the Automator with producer Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), their partnership began with revisiting ‘I Need a Gun’. This creative test quickly evolved, as Danger Mouse later told Q magazine that their true first collaboration was ‘Dirty Harry’: “At first, he didn’t want me to do the whole Gorillaz album or anything. He was curious about me, to see whether we could work together. The first track we did was ‘Dirty Harry’, which was a really raw, stripped-down demo.” Thus, ‘Dirty Harry’ became the pivotal point for their work together. Early in the process, Danger Mouse envisioned “Gregorian chanting and rapping” in the song, a mix of choral innocence and hip-hop urgency that became the emotional engine of ‘Dirty Harry’.
Building on these creative foundations, the song acts as a thematic sequel to ‘Clint Eastwood,’ the debut single that launched Gorillaz in 2001. Where ‘Clint Eastwood’ took its name from the actor’s spaghetti western persona, ‘Dirty Harry’ references the 1971 Don Siegel film where Eastwood plays a gun-toting San Francisco detective. Neither song mentions its title in the lyrics; the name serves as a mood and reference point, not a subject. In both cases, Eastwood symbolises a distinct American mythology: the lone gunman, the righteous enforcer, and the belief in the purposeful use of violence. ‘Dirty Harry’ interrogates that myth in the context of the Iraq War.
The song's most pointed lyrics come from Bootie Brown, rapper and founding member of The Pharcyde. His verse paints a soldier trapped in an impossible position: fighting in a war politicians have already declared over, bearing the weight of what cannot be unseen. Two lines in particular cut to the heart of the song’s class politics:
“And I’m filled with guilt
From things that I’ve seen
Your water’s from a bottle
Mine’s from a canteen”
Understanding Brown’s background further emphasises the song’s impact. Bootie Brown, born Romye Robinson in Los Angeles, began as a dancer, trained by choreographer Toni Basil, before co-founding The Pharcyde in 1991. Their debut, ‘Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde’ (1992), is highly regarded in alternative hip-hop. Subsequent collaborations with producer J Dilla profoundly shaped their sound. Building on this history, Brown became one of Gorillaz’s most enduring live collaborators, joining multiple tours and later appearing on ‘New Gold’ from ‘Cracker Island’ in 2022.
The San Fernando Valley Youth Chorus provides a third voice, strengthening the song’s political message beyond traditional protest. Children’s voices add tension and emotional weight to the lyrics: their innocence makes the song’s descriptions of conflict more poignant. This choice underscores the horror by contrasting it with youth and vulnerability.
“I need a gun to keep myself among
The poor people are burning in the sun
But they ain't got a chance.
They ain't got a chance”
Hearing children sing these words adds a disturbing intensity. The repeated “they ain’t got a chance” gains gravity in young voices, suggesting honest despair rather than anger. Debate over whether the first line is “among” or “harm” reflects broader concerns, but Albarn has confirmed it is “among”, aligning with his pacifist intentions. Regardless, both interpretations highlight the helplessness of ordinary people in conflict.
Albarn backed his artistic intent with activism. He was among Britain’s most vocal musicians opposing the Iraq invasion and helped organise a protest at London’s Hyde Park with Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, a close friend and key influence on Gorillaz’s debut sound.
The music video, released in October 2005 and produced by Passion Pictures, marked Gorillaz’s first use of a real location over full animation. Filmed in Namibia’s Swakopmund desert, it features 2-D animation and a children’s choir, stranded after a helicopter crash, singing as they await rescue. The other Gorillaz members arrive in a military vehicle, joined by Bootie Brown in fatigues, who emerges from the sand to rap. Though the scene required many takes, it finished without complaint. The breakdown of the truck undercuts resolution; some see it as a metaphor for the Iraq War’s unresolved end.
The single cover draws on the theatrical poster for Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war film ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ adding a visual layer to the song’s engagement with the aesthetics and mythology of military conflict. It's one of the band's most well-loved songs, and even over twenty years on, it's their most defining statement about the world. That feels all the more relevant today.
‘Silent Running’ is the fifth single and fourth track from ‘Cracker Island’ (2023). It was the first song Damon Albarn and producer Greg Kurstin worked on together. This track set the direction for the album. Kurstin said, “It just started the whole process for us: here’s the bar, this is what we can do.” They finished ‘Silent Running’ in two or three hours using a fast, creative process.
Starting with an old demo, Albarn and Kurstin built the track up, adding drums and synths. By day's end, Albarn hugged Kurstin, marking the enthusiastic start of their journey. The track features vocalist Adeleye Omotayo, a longtime Gorillaz collaborator and Humanz Choir member whose warmth and control shine in the post-chorus. Before joining Gorillaz, Omotayo backed Amy Winehouse and left a memorable impression. Rolling Stone praised the track as a “mid-tempo funk gem,” while Albarn called it "that mesmerising dreamlike state." The Genius Verified interview gave Albarn's first public lyric breakdown, offering a rare window into his process.
The title has two layers of meaning. First, 'silent running' is a submarine term for moving quietly to avoid detection by cutting engines, a mode of invisible, purposeful movement through a hostile environment. Second, it references the 1972 science fiction film 'Silent Running', directed by Douglas Trumbull, best known for his visual effects on '2001: A Space Odyssey.' In the film, botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) tends Earth's last forests aboard a space freighter orbiting Saturn, after environmental neglect has destroyed all plant life on Earth. When Lowell is ordered to destroy the domes and return the freighter to commercial use, he refuses and ultimately sacrifices everything to preserve what remains of nature. The film’s soundtrack, featuring Joan Baez's folk songs, gives it a melancholic, elegiac tone.
These themes of ecological grief, isolation, and preservation have grown more resonant over time. Gorillaz reference the film in the song’s title and mood. Like Lowell, the narrator drifts in isolation, clinging to purpose amid digital decay. The longing for something “worth preserving” echoes the film’s bittersweet hope, while the music’s subdued atmosphere mirrors the movie’s melancholy and resilience.
Both meanings influence Albarn’s lyrics. The narrator drifts through endless screens in a machine-assisted haze. Lines like “machine-assisted, I disappeared, into a dream you don’t wanna hear, how I got caught up in nowhere again” evoke the sense of being lost online, present, active, but directionless. The chorus cements this mood:
Searching for a new world that waits on the sunrise.
The “infinite pages” refer to endless scrolling. The labyrinthine second verse deepens this idea: “In the labyrinth, I disappear / There’s no way out of here” conveys being trapped in the digital world's loop. This evokes the feeling of being stuck with no clear escape. Albarn described this state as “that sort of mesmerising dreamlike state you get in when you’re just following some train of thought.” In contrast, 2-D put it more plainly: “Sometimes I get well lost and end up in the wrong place, but then it turns out that’s where I was meant to be going anyway.”
The longing for “a new world that waits on the sunrise” mirrors Lowell’s hope in the film. Despite ruin, something enduring remains: terror and uncertainty coexist with a strange freedom. The idea that getting lost could lead somewhere worth finding echoes this theme. The song embodies environmental grief and digital exhaustion, two anxieties of the 2020s, without offering a tidy resolution. This ongoing search for meaning amid chaos leads to the broader themes of 'Cracker Island.' Here, the band explores disconnection, cult-like communities, and the quest for belonging in a fragmented digital world. The album balances melancholy and hope, with 'Silent Running' at its heart, poised between despair and renewal.
The music video, directed by Jamie Hewlett and Fx Goby and produced by Nexus Studios, connects to the album’s story. The band infiltrates the Forever Cult to rescue 2-D from a demon under the Hollywood sign. Distracted by cult leader Moon Flower, Murdoc drops his cologne, Essence of Murdoc, into the demon’s mouth, causing it to explode. Murdoc escapes while the others are arrested, leading into the next video. Filming took place at the High School of Electrical Engineering Nikola Tesla in Belgrade, Serbia. During the shoot, Albarn wrote ‘Russian Strings,’ later released with Blur in 2023.
‘Silent Running’ debuted live at Primavera 0 in Montevideo on 28 April 2022, nearly a year before its release. Unlike other singles, it was played live only once before the official launch. This gave fans a rare glimpse. Early social media reactions highlighted the song’s haunting atmosphere and praised Omotayo’s powerful vocals. Some fans called it an immediate standout, even in its rough form. The song was released on 27 January 2023. The video followed on 8 February, ahead of the album’s 24 February launch. Three days later, the deluxe edition arrived, featuring a solo piano version with Omotayo. This version revealed the song’s core strength without full production, funk, or electronics. Critics responded warmly, noting how it spotlighted the emotive songwriting and Omotayo’s expressive performance. The contrast between the full production and the solo piano take gave listeners a new appreciation for the song’s musical depth.
Released on 9 May 2005 as the lead single from 'Demon Days', 'Feel Good Inc.' featuring De La Soul, is the song that broke Gorillaz globally. The debut had done well in the UK and made inroads in America, but this track put them in a different category. It peaked at number two in the UK and number fourteen in the US. It also topped the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for eight weeks and appeared in Pitchfork and Rolling Stone’s Best Songs of the 2000s. At the 48th Grammy Awards, it won Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, making Gorillaz the first animated act to win a Grammy. They performed at the ceremony in a striking mashup with Madonna, using holograms to project the animated band on stage.
Damon Albarn wrote the song on the way to perform at Coachella with Blur in 2003, passing through what he called the “amazing windmill valley” near Palm Springs for the first time. That image lodged itself in the song’s chorus. The track was produced by Danger Mouse, whom Albarn had insisted on working with after hearing The Grey Album, his unauthorised mashup of Jay-Z and The Beatles. EMI were resistant to the pairing, wary of the legal controversy still surrounding that record, but Albarn held firm. It was Danger Mouse who suggested De La Soul, leveraging his friendship with the group, though De La Soul had originally been approached for 'Kids With Guns'. David Jolicoeur, also known as Trugoy the Dove, chose the instrumental for 'Feel Good Inc.' over the original.
The opening laugh, instantly recognisable and slightly unsettling, came from De La Soul member Pasemaster Mase, who was simply laughing at the music being made in the studio that day. Sonically, the track is anchored by Simon Tong’s guitar and a bass line from Morgan Nicholls that spans two full octaves, giving it an unusual physical weight for a song that otherwise floats
The song critiques manufactured happiness and media-induced passivity. The Feel Good Inc. tower in the video symbolises corporate culture and entertainment as tools of control, keeping inhabitants distracted and docile. Jamie Hewlett described the main themes as intellectual freedom and the media’s dumbing down of culture. Hewlett cited Hayao Miyazaki as a direct influence, especially for the floating windmill island, drawn from Laputa in Miyazaki’s 1986 film Castle in the Sky. The video premiered publicly at SXSW in Austin on 17 March 2005, and was later released officially. At the video’s end, 2-D, overwhelmed by his surroundings, returns to his original state, repeating “feel good” as if self-brainwashing rather than confronting reality. Commercially, the song reached the top ten in sixteen countries, hit number one in Spain, Poland, and Greece, and was certified four-times platinum in the UK, five-times platinum in Canada, and seven-times platinum in New Zealand.
The windmill seen on Noodle’s floating island, outside the tower window, represents optimism and a return to simpler times, a human creation in contrast to corporate machinery. The windmill also drew inspiration from William Blake’s poem “And did those feet in ancient time.” The video’s story continues into El Mañana, as helicopters pursue Noodle’s island at the end of 'Feel Good Inc'., with devastating results. In America, an iPod commercial featuring the song boosted its visibility, expanding its reach beyond charts. 'Demon Days' was also promoted through concert residencies in Manchester and New York, titled 'Demon Days Live', during which Gorillaz performed the album with guest artists, a rare occurrence for an officially non-existent band.
The track became the band’s first video to reach a billion YouTube views, crossing the milestone on 13 July 2025. At the 48th Grammy Awards, it was nominated for Record of the Year, Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (which it won), and Best Short Form Music Video.
Released on 31 August 2022 as the second single from ‘Cracker Island’, ‘New Gold’ (with Tame Impala and Bootie Brown) began production in 2020. Originally slated for ‘Song Machine, Season Two, the track was shelved with that project and did not appear in ‘Song Machine, Season One’ due to delays. Greg Kurstin and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker co-produced the song, marking Gorillaz’s first work with Parker and their first reunion with Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde since his feature on ‘Dirty Harry’ in 2005. Against this backdrop of evolving partnerships, ‘New Gold’ exemplifies the band’s continued boundary-pushing approach.
The song is woozy and psychedelic, anchored by a distorted guitar line. Written in 6/4 time, it feels off-kilter, guided by Bootie Brown’s precise verses. Parker delivers the layered hook while Brown raps two sharp verses. Albarn enters midway through in a low-key haze over funky bass and skipping drums. This interplay gives the track a shifting, unsettled feel. Gorillaz debuted it live at All Points East in London on 19 August 2022 with Parker and Brown, twelve days before release.
The ‘new gold’ of the title is fool’s gold: superficial rewards from modern consumer culture like plastic surgery, social media validation, and viral moments, glittering but empty. Bootie Brown’s verses critique this world sharply, while Parker’s chorus offers a more ambiguous ‘magic cove’: beautiful but underwater, promising fulfilment and causing disorientation. The bridge clarifies: “New gold, fool’s gold / Everything will disappear.” The lyrics reference three earlier Gorillaz songs with precision: Brown’s second verse name-checks Shaun Ryder, who featured on ‘DARE’, with the line “Like Shaun, he’s a Ryder, took on the dare”; the following lines describe friendship as a revolving door, a direct lift of the title and imagery of ‘Revolving Doors’ from ‘Plastic Beach’; and the song’s broader critique of distraction, manufactured pleasure, and cultural numbness echoes the themes of ‘Feel Good Inc.’ across the whole track.
The visualiser, directed by Jamie Hewlett and Steve Gallagher of SWEAR Studio, surrounds the animated band with gilded symbols: Xanax pills, police emblems, cameras, chains, and statues, all rendered in gold, suggesting that the song's visual world is contaminated by what it critiques. An alternative version featuring Kevin Parker footage was released on 25 September 2022. Commercially, ‘New Gold’ peaked at number two on the US Alternative Airplay Songs chart and number four on the Bubbling Under Hot 100. It was later shortlisted for Song of the Year at the 2024 APRA Music Awards, and a Dom Dolla remix appeared on the deluxe edition of ‘Cracker Island’.
The fourth single and ninth track from 'Cracker Island' (2023), 'Skinny Ape' was written and produced by Albarn and Grammy-winning American producer Greg Kurstin, with the two playing all the instruments. Kurstin described the song's creation as having something "mad and crazy" about it, and the final result bears that out: it is a song of two distinct halves that somehow feel like one. It begins with a mellow, almost folk-like ambience, featuring delicate acoustic guitar and Albarn's introspective, quiet and unhurried vocals, closer in spirit to his solo work than anything in the Gorillaz catalogue. Then, roughly halfway through, it erupts into a thunderous electronic surge, driven by crashing drum breaks and dense layered synths, a hyperpop-inflected frenzy that arrives like a freight train.
The inspiration came from an unlikely source. When debuting the song live in San Francisco in September 2022, Albarn told the crowd it was inspired by an Amazon delivery robot he had seen walking the streets of Los Angeles: "The Amazon bot that walks down the road and delivers things. It's something we haven't got on my little island far away yet. And I saw it first in Los Angeles, and it inspired me to pen this tune." That image of a machine doing the work of a human, navigating a world it was built for but does not belong to, runs quietly through the song's DNA.
Lyrically, the song is written from the perspective of 2-D, Gorillaz's hollow-eyed frontman, and carries a quality of tender self-erasure. "Don't be sad for me, I'm a cartoon G" is both a reassurance and a confession: a fictional character acknowledging his own unreality, asking not to be mourned. "I can disappear, all I am your day, in this vacant stage I'm a skinny little ape" extends the metaphor further, 2-D casting himself as something slight and peripheral, a creature on the margins of the world rather than its centre. The song works simultaneously as a meditation on obsolescence, a lament for the human in an automated age, and a surprisingly tender piece of self-portraiture.
In many ways, the track functions as a sonic memoir of Albarn's entire career, and nowhere is the Blur-Gorillaz divide more openly collapsed than here. The opening minutes belong entirely to Blur. The sparse, unhurried acoustic guitar and the quiet, slightly melancholic vocal delivery sit closest in spirit to 'Think Tank' (2003), Blur's most introspective and experimental album, and to 'The Magic Whip' (2015), the reunion record that found them in a reflective, almost elegiac mood. There is none of the dense layering or collaborative bustle that defines most Gorillaz records: just a man, a guitar, and a feeling. Albarn's vocal phrasing in the first half also recalls the wry, observational quality of 'Parklife' and 'The Great Escape' era Blur, that very English habit of holding emotion at arm's length while letting it seep through the cracks anyway.
Then the song detonates. The second half belongs entirely to Gorillaz, crashing drum machines and dense electronic production arriving with the same blunt force as 'Song 2', Blur's most visceral and least typical moment, which itself felt like Albarn testing how far he could push before the band broke. It is not a coincidence that 'Skinny Ape' feels like both bands at once: Gorillaz was born directly out of Albarn's restlessness with Blur.
By the late 1990s, Britpop had run its course, and Blur's fame had grown suffocating. Gorillaz gave him the freedom to go further than Blur's identity would allow, but 'Skinny Ape' suggests that the distance between the two was never as great as it seemed. Here, they exist in the same four minutes, the same song, almost the same breath. Murdoc, characteristically, was less reflective about all this at the 'Cracker Island' listening party: "Ah, the vagaries of existence as an ape wearing the forlorn rags of growing old."
The single's release on 8 December 2022 was accompanied by an extraordinary visual event: two immersive augmented reality performances at Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London, built using Google's ARCore Geospatial API technology, projecting the four band members at enormous scale into two of the world's most iconic skylines. It was a fittingly outsized debut for a song about smallness.
For me, 'Skinny Ape' stands as a breathtaking testament to Albarn's artistic evolution that is not just one of the best Gorillaz songs to date, but a bold declaration of what the band, and Albarn himself, are capable of achieving.
Delirium’, featuring the posthumous vocals of Mark E. Smith, is the tenth track from ‘The Mountain’, Gorillaz’s ninth studio album, released on 27 February 2026. The album was born from grief: both Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett lost their fathers within days of each other in late 2023. Soon after these losses, they travelled to India together; while there, they scattered ashes in the Ganges and immersed themselves in Hindu and Buddhist mourning traditions. The album initially planned before their trip changed entirely as a result, and ‘The Mountain’ emerged from this period.
Albarn built a record reflecting death and its echoes, using posthumous contributions from six earlier collaborators, with only unreleased material. He explained, “If we’re going to talk about death, I need some people who are dead to help me.” ‘The Mountain’ is Gorillaz’s first album on their label, KONG, released after 26 years with Parlophone and Warner, and dedicated to both artists’ fathers and all previous collaborators. Mark E. Smith, who led The Fall for 42 years and released 31 studio albums, died in 2018. Smith previously worked with Gorillaz on ‘Glitter Freeze’ and toured with them in 2010. ‘Delirium’ features Smith’s unused vocals, recorded during the ‘Plastic Beach’ sessions fifteen years before release.
Smith’s contribution never settles into the song, as intended. His barked vocals are confrontational, delivering surreal lines like "Shrunken China Heads" and "Peg-legged slave trader" with feverish logic, not traditional verses. The track moves from a celestial opening to steady synth to manic percussion, constantly shifting between serenity and frenzy, matching the title’s delirium. In the first verse, 2-D describes panic before a new god on a mountain, unsure of himself. The second verse escalates with “fires on the mountain and the full moon’s come,” a line full of warning. The lyric may refer to technology, politics, or mortality. Under the Radar called ‘Delirium’ the album’s biggest banger, best played loud. The song premiered at the House of Kong show in London on 3 September 2025.
‘On Melancholy Hill’ is the tenth track and third single from ‘Plastic Beach’, released on 12 June 2010. It stands out as the gentlest song on an album exploring environmental collapse and consumer culture. Murdoc called it “a genuine pop moment” and said, “It’s nice to break up the album with something a little lighter.” Albarn originally wrote the song during sessions for ‘The Good, the Bad & the Queen’s’ self-titled album before repurposing it for ‘Plastic Beach’, aiming for “that kind of summery sound.” Paul Simonon, his bandmate in that project, played bass on the track. The song was recorded at Studio 13 in West London, with additional sessions at Albarn’s home studio in Devon, which included seagull and ocean field recordings to deepen the nautical atmosphere.
The song’s emotional weight comes from simplicity: "Up on melancholy hill, there’s a plastic tree." The plastic tree represents the album’s synthetic world. As Murdoc put it, the hill is "that place in your soul, like someone’s let your tyres down." The narrator doesn’t try to escape or fix this; instead, they ask, "Are you here with me?" and offer, "You can’t get what you want, but you can get me." That line may carry a deliberate echo of The Beatles’ ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, which offers presence rather than everything else. Albarn had three bells cast in the notes D, A, and C-sharp for the track by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, but they were ultimately unused.
Albarn described the song’s tone as balancing pessimism and beauty: “It’s part of the pessimism of our consumer condition; on the other hand, there’s a beauty in it, and that’s where the melancholy wins.” The second verse adds submarines and open sea, conjuring childlike escapism for an uncertain future. Rather than offering a triumphant escape, it expresses the hope that lingers when the world is broken. This blend of pessimism and hope is echoed visually in the accompanying music video.
The music video, directed by Jamie Hewlett and co-directed by Pete Candeland, animated by Passion Pictures, alternates between two storylines. Noodle survives a ship attack on the ocean liner, the M. Harriet, and escapes in a lifeboat with her guitar; a gigantic Russel Hobbs, swollen by the pollution of the ocean he has been swimming through, surfaces beneath her. Meanwhile, Murdoc, 2-D, and Cyborg Noodle travel in submarines crewed by collaborators including Lou Reed, Snoop Dogg, De La Soul, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Gruff Rhys. The stories don’t resolve; the video ends as fog reveals Plastic Beach. The video was released exclusively on iTunes on 15 June 2010 before being uploaded to the official Gorillaz YouTube channel a week later. Fans view it as a sequel to ‘El Mañana’ and a prequel to the ‘Rhinestone Eyes’ storyboard, placing it at the centre of Noodle’s Phase 3 journey; the submarine scenes also continue directly from the ‘Stylo’ video, with 2-D still wearing his clown mask and the bullet hole still visible in Cyborg Noodle’s head.
The singles promotion included an internet scavenger hunt: fans who tracked down a series of hidden images of the band were rewarded with an exclusive remix by Josh Wink. In 2010, the song was performed on Later... with Jools Holland, broadening its audience beyond the album’s existing fanbase. Since the Escape to Plastic Beach Tour, starting in 2010, it has featured in nearly every Gorillaz concert, making it one of their most consistently performed live songs. The song was certified Platinum in the UK, appeared in the third episode of ‘Life Is Strange 2’ in 2019, and was used in Tesco’s 2024 Christmas advertising campaign. By September 2025, fifteen years after its release, it re-entered the US Billboard Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart; by November that same year, it had accumulated over 889 million Spotify streams.
Any list of the best Gorillaz songs is, by its nature, an act of omission. The ten tracks here represent what I consider the band’s finest work, but the catalogue they were drawn from is deep enough to fill several lists of equal quality. There are songs that did not make this list that would headline almost any other band’s greatest hits.
‘Clint Eastwood’, the debut single from 2001, is the obvious starting point: the track that introduced the world to Gorillaz, built around a sample of the ‘Dirty Harry’ film theme and Del the Funky Homosapien’s unforgettable verse, it remains one of the most distinctive debut singles in British music history. ‘19-2000’, from the same self-titled album, is the band’s purest pop moment from that era; its Soulchild remix in particular became inescapable, a song that managed to be simultaneously cool and joyful in a way very few tracks achieve. ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’, the band’s actual debut single, predates the album and carries a rawness and melancholy that the later, more polished records rarely revisit; it is the sound of something being invented in real time.
From ‘Demon Days’, ‘DARE’ is arguably the band’s most purely danceable track: built around Shaun Ryder’s eccentric vocal performance and a pounding four-to-the-floor beat, it gave Gorillaz their only UK number one single and remains a fixture of their live shows. ‘Kids With Guns’ and ‘Don’t Get Lost in Heaven’, the two sides of the album’s final double A-side single, represent the record’s emotional poles; ‘Kids With Guns’ is one of Gorillaz’s most urgent political statements, its paranoid riff and Neneh Cherry’s contribution giving it a tension that never fully resolves, while ‘Don’t Get Lost in Heaven’ is perhaps the most quietly devastating thing Albarn has ever written, a gospel-inflected meditation on mortality that closes ‘Demon Days’ with something close to grace.
From ‘The Now Now’, ‘Tranz’ deserves particular mention: a hypnotic, motorik track that strips the Gorillaz sound back to its essentials, propulsive and slightly unnerving, it is one of the band’s most underrated recordings and a reminder that Albarn at his most minimal is still operating at a level few can match.
The truth is that Gorillaz have been making essential music for over two decades, across nine studio albums and a catalogue of singles, B-sides, and collaborations that most bands could only dream of. These ten songs are a starting point, not a verdict.