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GorillaZ VibeZ

Eleven tracks from the record where a cartoon band made their strangest and least commercial album, and got it right.

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Gorillaz: Humanz-era selections

Gorillaz began as a joke about manufactured pop — Damon Albarn and the illustrator Jamie Hewlett inventing an animated band so that the music could be anything without a frontman's biography getting in the way. Twenty-five years on, the joke has produced one of the most interesting bodies of work in British pop, largely because the conceit removed every constraint about genre.

These selections come mostly from Humanz (2017), which is the least loved of their major albums and in some ways the most interesting. It was built as a party record for a catastrophe — Albarn has described the brief as imagining a specific dark political event — and it is deliberately fragmented, with interludes, abrupt transitions and a guest list that never lets any one voice dominate.

What to listen for

"Submission" with Danny Brown and Kelela is the best track here and one of the best in the whole catalogue — a house-adjacent groove, a superb Kelela vocal, and Danny Brown arriving to wreck it.

"Andromeda" with DRAM is the most beautiful thing on the album, and it is worth knowing that Albarn wrote it in the aftermath of a personal bereavement — it explains why a dance record sounds that sad.

"Busted and Blue" is the only track with no guest at all, and it is the one where Albarn's own voice carries everything.

"Sex Murder Party" with Jamie Principle and Zebra Katz is the Chicago house lineage made explicit — Principle is a genuine founding figure of that genre.

"Out of Body" with Kilo Kish and Zebra Katz is the strangest thing here, and "Ticker Tape" with Carly Simon and Kali Uchis is the most improbable credit on any album of that year.

"Baby Queen" is the deep cut the devoted listeners name, and the interludes — including "The Non-Conformist Oath" — are part of the structure rather than filler.

Go deeper

Demon Days (2005) is the masterpiece and Plastic Beach (2010) the most ambitious. Humanz rewards patience.

Damon Albarn's other projects are worth following — The Good, the Bad & the Queen and particularly Africa Express, which has produced some remarkable records.

How to hear it: the fragmentation is the design. Interludes cut songs off, guests arrive and leave without resolution, and the record deliberately refuses to settle into a groove for long — which is what makes it the least loved and most interesting of their major albums. Heard as a whole it is coherent; heard as singles it falls apart.

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