![\"Michael](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/d444dea6b0b000db03a1b8f66073e4e3f68ff42c.jpeg\")
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n Save this article for later<\/p>\n Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.<\/p>\n Got it<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n Death touches everyone, sooner or later. Even cartoon characters. \u201cYou know the hardest thing\/ is to say goodbye\/ to someone you love,\u201d is lead singer 2D\u2019s recurring refrain on the new Gorillaz album, The Mountain. He may be an animated figment of Damon Albarn\u2019s imagination, but the depth of feeling is no joke.<\/p>\n The Gorillaz are a \u2018virtual band\u2019 formed by former Blur frontman Albarn, and artist Jamie Hewlett in 1998. It features four fictional band members 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle and Russel Hobbs with their video clips released as animations, and the band\u2019s imagery also featuring the characters.<\/p>\n Their new album, The Mountain is about death and transcendence, swirling with voices of the dearly departed. The actor Dennis Hopper, Trugoy from De La Soul, Afrobeat architect Tony Allen, soul legend Bobby Womack, The Fall\u2019s Mark E Smith and Detroit rapper Proof all chime in from the great beyond.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a panoramic hour that plays like a journey along the edge of the proverbial veil. Anoushka Shankar\u2019s celestial sitar, Ajay Prasanna\u2019s divine flute and choral voices make like some sepulchral welcoming committee. If this is cartoon pop, it\u2019s come a long way from The Archies\u2019 Sugar Sugar.<\/p>\n But haven\u2019t we all? Apart from the fallen comrades named above, Albarn and Gorillaz\u2019 visual artist Jamie Hewlett both lost their fathers within 10 days in 2024. The Mountain is a creative act of public grieving and personal reckoning. Even virtual pop stars have to grow up and face that music.<\/p>\n Gorillaz would be acquainted, no doubt, with canonical explorations of bereavement like Neil Young\u2019s Tonight\u2019s The Night and Lou Reed\u2019s Magic and Loss: works made in the throes of grief to try to make sense of the kind of questions that popular music, certainly in their time, was designed to ignore.<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, Johnny Cash and George Harrison were among the first \u201960s legends to make final albums in the conscious shadow of their imminent departures. As the rock \u2032n\u2019 roll years took their toll, it made sense that the more thoughtful survivors would begin composing their own last testaments.<\/p>\n The death album concept escalated dramatically when David Bowie released his swansong, Blackstar, 10 years ago. The opening line of Lazarus \u2013 \u201cLook up here, I\u2019m in heaven\u201d \u2013 was instantly immortal when he died days after its release on his 69th birthday.<\/p>\n That same year, again within days of his passing, Leonard Cohen\u2019s You Want It Darker didn\u2019t flinch either. More overtly spiritual in life and closer to a fair innings at 82, he regarded the abyss with less of Bowie\u2019s trademark dread but enough deathbed doubt to keep it real.<\/p>\n Songwriters reflecting on mortality was not new. What changed was the scale. In the hands of such monumental figures, the final curtain became an epic canvas that amplified the human condition in ways that fans would unpick forever.<\/p>\n Not that younger generations of songwriters needed permission to grieve out loud. Kurt Cobain made raw psychic pain the lingua franca for Generation X. By the 2010s, the \u201cpersonal truth\u201d imperative of the new confessional wave had no time for their grandparents\u2019 notions of discretion and decorum.<\/p>\n When Sufjan Stevens released Carrie & Lowell in 2015, it felt weirdly transgressive: a son cataloguing a complicated relationship with his late mother. As Mount Eerie, Washington indie-folk artist Phil Elverum went way further with A Crow Looked at Me, recorded in the room where his wife had died weeks earlier, refusing metaphor and resolution to become a critics\u2019 favourite in 2017.<\/p>\n From Rufus Wainwright\u2019s sombre All Days Are Nights to Japanese Breakfast\u2019s perversely upbeat Psychopomp to the hardcore fury of Touche Amore\u2019s Stage Four, the song cycle processing a lost parent has become a potent genre unto itself, a shared gothic undertow to pop in all its forms.<\/p>\n![\"Jamie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/7dc3fe5d4183ba4f22627d833f7be9052cca30eb.jpeg\")
Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn and their Gorillaz characters. \u00a0Gorillaz and Ruben Bastienne-Lewis<\/p>\n![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/5889d2a2ceee623dab3c34c5f6faba90b56ff48d.jpeg\")
David Bowie in the video for the release of his final album Blackstar \u2013 made just before his death aged 69. <\/p>\n![\"Japanese](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/674df85f7b2c676cfb1607ec85a62b848dacac0b.jpeg\")
Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner performing in Melbourne last year. \u00a9Martin Philbey<\/p>\n
![\"Damon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/c4158110ebe0de69b9ce8d057fbd156a78ca59d8.jpeg\")
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett recorded the new Gorillaz album while travelling In India.<\/p>\n