Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, real-life members of the GRAMMY Award-winning virtual band Gorillaz, join Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to celebrate their new single "The Manifesto," the second track to be released from the forthcoming ninth studio album, The Mountain – slated to drop March 2026. In the conversation, the band's co-founders discuss what fans can expect from the highly anticipated album, the return of Kong Studios, and what it was like to collaborate with XX on the latest single.
Jamie Hewlett tells Apple Music about working on the final designs for the forthcoming album 'The Mountain'
All the album artwork I'm delivering next week, and then I'm on the video. We're doing a very long video this time. We're doing an eight-minute long video, which is hand animated, not using any computers, or any bullshit. Old school. I've been looking at stuff like the original Jungle Book by Walt Disney, or One Hundred and One Dalmatians, back at the old school, '60s styles. And also, it's kind of a statement about AI, and computers, and how everything's just so saturated these days. And I like the idea of something that's human made, right down to the point where you do it by hand.
And when I proposed this to the animation company, they got very excited, well the animators, because no one does that anymore. It's more expensive, and it takes twice as long, but it's a statement. I want to do something that's real, that's not done on computers, and it feels great. It's exciting, but we're kind of using old techniques, and trying to find old cells to animate on. These things don't really exist anymore. And it's amazing when you go on social media, how many fans are saying, "Is that AI?" "Did they use AI?" "Is it an NFT?" and it's like, "No, no, no. We don't do that shit." But it's got to the point where people can't tell the difference now, and that's kind of worrying, as well. So this will look like a hand drawn cell.
Damon Albarn tells Apple Music about making the new Gorillaz album under their brand-new own record label Kong
It's a lot more work, that's for sure. I'm kind of paying attention to things I have been sort criminally negligent of over the years, smoke rings, you know what I mean? And just like what you spend on one thing, and the consequence, and where that would... It's just interesting. It is more grown up. But the upside of it is you are really invested in what you're doing. I'm not saying that you're not in any other guys, but you really have to make your best decisions.
Damon Albarn tells Apple Music about the meaning behind latest single "The Manifesto"
We call it the manifesto because it kind of embodied a lot of the ideas that are explored on the record. Not so much lyrically, but sonically. There's three, four parts to it, so it goes around a lot of places, and you could take bits of it off. Like you could take the Trueno bit at the top, and just use that as its own thing. And then you can use... It was produced with the brass, and then Proof, as a part two, so there's different... There's a lot you can do with it anyway
Damon Albarn tells Apple Music about working with Argentine rapper Trueno
Well, I have to give credit to my daughter for introducing me to Trueno. She was way onto it, way, way, way, way, way, way, way before, and then we were in Buenos Aires, and we invited him. Yeah, we invited him to do “Clint Eastwood,” we was, because I thought he's a brilliant freestyler, so he'd enjoy that, you know what I mean? And we just really hit it off. He's amazing, you know what I mean? I'm very jealous
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett tell Apple Music about featuring the late D12 rapper Proof on their single "The Manifesto" and other posthumous appearances on the upcoming album
Damon Albarn: Well, I wanted to kind of meditate on loss. This record with Jamie and me, it was our fathers, and how do we do something in relation to Gorillaz that has that resonance? And in a way, looking through outtakes from people who we've had privilege and joy to work with, it seemed like a really nice thing to do. And see if you could make something, in a sense, animate it, and animate something that's lost.
Zane Lowe: That is such a... Oh, my God, I got super emotional again. That is a really powerful guideline for how you want to approach this.
Damon Albarn: Yeah, that's the record. It's like that, really.
Zane Lowe: Wow. I can't wait to hear this album, for all the reasons, and now very much so for that reason.
Jamie Hewlett: But there's the voices of everyone we've worked with, who's no longer with us, are on the album. It's not just Proof. We've got Bobby, we've got Mark E. Smith, we've got Dave.
Damon Albarn: We've got Black Thought talking to Dave.
Zane Lowe: Wow, that's so crazy.
Damon Albarn: Yeah, it's really mad because he knows Dave. He knew Dave. He's part of that whole family, like Yasiin Bey, as well. And yeah, I mean, I think everyone kind of gets it within our kind of family, our musical fucking family.
Jamie Hewlett: It was in the original manifesto that we wrote on the archetypal back of an envelope, and one of the things, one of the points, was that Russell would be able to reanimate dead rappers.
Zane Lowe: Wow, but way back in the beginning?
Jamie Hewlett: That was the point.
Damon Albarn: That was the original idea, yeah.
Damon Albarn tells Apple Music about plans to bring Gorillaz’s exclusive immersive exhibition, "The House of Kong," to Los Angeles
Hopefully, we're going to come to LA, and hopefully, fingers crossed, we're going to bring the exhibition over, and hopefully, we're going to play a Mountain show in the new year, so not that long. Our manifesto is one that deserves airing, because it's very multifaceted, and multicultural, and is in five languages. It's in Hindi, it's in English, it's in Spanish, it's in Yoruba, and it's in Arabic.
