The protagonist of “The Tired Influencer” has only Siri to talk to in their “cracked-screen world,” and in “Skinny Ape,” band member 2-D resigns to future abandonment like outdated tech.
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The songs on the Island that Albarn sings by himself tend to muse on how to live with loneliness and the drift that pulls friendships apart.
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Giving a recent tour of his West London studio to Zane Lowe, Albarn showed off a piano with an “I <3 Melancholia” sticker on the front panel, an honest assessment of a career that has yielded devastating ballads, from “Best Days” off Blur’s The Great Escape to “El Mañana” from Gorillaz’s Demon Days to the 2021 solo-album cut “Particles.” Cracker Island challenges these tendencies in the same way Gorillaz was meant to pull away from the Britpop box Blur felt trapped in when the band started making the racket that led to “Song 2.” The bright synth tones Albarn achieved from raiding Kurstin’s synthesizer collection counterbalance the singer-songwriter’s natural attraction to somber melodies. (Hearing the “Rhiannon” singer compare a cluster-bomb strike to drum-and-bass music is alone worth the price of entry.) “New Gold” invites the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown to kick rhymes over Parker and Albarn’s dizzying, washed-out groove, mixing ’80s pop sonics, ’90s rap flows, and aughts neo-psych. Nicks plays the raspy voice of reason to the dejected lead in “Oil,” swooping up from underneath and carrying a sad song to a euphoric finish that feels both reverent to Fleetwood’s sound and hell-bent on stuffing it with as much outer-space noise and jargon as possible.
The ride is smooth because Albarn is a chameleon whose songs adapt quickly to whatever company he’s in.
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Conceptualized during time spent in Southern California, Island taps into the local scene as Albarn has done on previous recording trips to Iceland, Mali, and China. In Los Angeles, he worked with super-producer Greg Kurstin (Sia, Adele, Foo Fighters) - who contributed a wealth of guitar, bass, and percussion parts and corralled pop-rock icon Stevie Nicks for a song - and reached out to notable full- and part-time Angelenos like Thundercat, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, and Beck for features.Ĭracker Island is a journey through the history of West Coast pop music - the sleek adult-contemporary folk-pop Nicks brought to Fleetwood Mac in the ’70s, the sunny New Wave of middle-period No Doubt, the glossy dance rock that excites Coachella crowds - but it also pulls from the stuff Albarn grew up on, like the populist, genre-hopping exploits of the late Specials and Fun Boy Three front man Terry Hall. And while Gorillaz was cooked up to pursue sounds that fell outside Blur’s pointedly British musical purview, the cartoon band Albarn created with artist Jamie Hewlett always knew its way around a rock tune.Ĭracker Island, Gorillaz’s eighth album, makes the clearest case yet for the unit as an outlet for Albarn’s most radio-ready sounds, a smirking virtual pop band whose bright, childlike melodies transformed it into a stadium act. Yes, Blur blew up Stateside thanks to the chugging guitars in 1997’s “Song 2,” but the 1994 disco message track “Girls & Boys” pushed the Britpop outfit’s hit parade into overdrive elsewhere on the planet. But that’s underselling the slipperiness of the guy, the tool kit, and the catalogue. The song would later end up becoming Pharrell’s debut single as a solo artist, revealing that the entire song, he was “pretending to be Prince”.It’s tempting to frame Gorillaz as a sorting convention, a destination for all the bubbly electronic sounds front man Damon Albarn neglects in the globe-trotting musicology experiments that live in his solo records and in the alt-rock chops displayed by Blur and the Good, the Bad, & the Queen. I’ve tried for years to make records for him… My first attempt at making a record for him was ‘Frontin.’ He didn’t want it … I think he heard the melodies - again, it’s been so long - he might’ve heard the hook and maybe the melodies … No, I think I wrote a different version of it for him. Pharrell would later expand on “Frontin'” being written for Prince, when he appeared on Noreaga’s Drink Champs podcast on December 17, 2020: I made ‘Frontin’ for Prince, and even ‘Happy’, I wrote that for CeeLo. And, to be clear and to be honest, songs that I ended up putting out by myself were always songs that I wrote for other people. Collaboration has always been part of my DNA. In a 2018 interview with Clash Music, Pharrell revealed that “Frontin'” was originally written for Prince.Īll of my biggest songs were songs that I did with or for other people.
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