Gorillaz: Cracker Island review – smaller, subtler, and better for it

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined in the excess – although there are nonetheless cameos from the likes of Dangerous Bunny and Stevie Nicks – for a trim album that is likely one of the band’s greatest

Right here’s a sobering thought for anybody sufficiently old to recall the early 00s first-hand: Cracker Island arrives 22 years on from Gorillaz’s debut single, Clint Eastwood. Founded by Damon Albarn, an alt-rock star apparently dabbling in pop, and his former flatmate Jamie Hewlett, who provided the cartoons, it was a challenge you may need assumed can be a short-lived joke. However almost a quarter of a century on, Gorillaz have made as many studio albums as Albarn’s main band and, within the course of, have achieved issues Blur haven’t: a string of US Prime 10 albums, considered one of them double-platinum; a Grammy; and entente cordiale with Oasis – or at the least Noel Gallagher, who appeared on 2017’s We Acquired the Energy.

They’ve also proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur lately, but we stay in an period when pop is fuelled by the type of cross-genre collaborations that started popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had kind of consumed their output solely by the release of 2010’s Plastic Beach. In fact, their present prevalence in all probability has more to do with making an attempt to recreation the streaming providers’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s influence, but nonetheless. You possibly can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Soiled Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical taste by the truth that Gorillaz are nonetheless enjoying arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting within the sort of quantities they once bought; final yr, Billie Eilish stated Albarn “changed my life” when she invited him to sing Really feel Good Inc together with her at Coachella.