“The end is the beginning” has always been more than a tagline in the Gorillaz universe it’s a working method. With the release of “Orange County”, the virtual band unveil the emotional spine of their forthcoming album The Mountain, out February 27, and reaffirm their long-standing instinct to treat collaboration not as ornamentation, but as architecture.
Led by Damon Albarn, Gorillaz return here in a form that feels expansive but unforced. “Orange County,” co-produced with Argentine hitmaker Bizarrap, layers Albarn’s melodic restraint with the clarity of poet Kara Jackson and the fluid, devotional sitar lines of Anoushka Shankar. The result isn’t maximalist in the way Gorillaz singles often are it’s open, buoyant, and quietly resolute.
The track arrives paired with its companion piece, “The Hardest Thing”, an elegiac meditation on loss featuring the voice of late Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen, who passed away in 2020. Heard together, the two songs form a single eight-minute movement: grief dissolving into forward motion, memory giving way to light. “The hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love,” Allen intones, a lyric that echoes into “Orange County,” where sorrow is not erased but recontextualized.
The Mountain is Gorillaz’ ninth studio album, and it plays like a summit meeting of ghosts, legends, and restless collaborators. Recorded across London, India, the Middle East, and multiple U.S. cities, the album spans five languages and dozens of musical traditions. It features an ambitious cast from Black Thought and Yasiin Bey to Johnny Marr, IDLES, Omar Souleyman, and Sparks.
But the album’s emotional gravity comes from its dialogue with absence. Voices of departed collaborators, including Bobby Womack, Mark E. Smith, and Dennis Hopper, are woven into the fabric of the record, transforming The Mountain into what Gorillaz describe as “a playlist for a party on the border between this world and whatever happens next.”
The album’s release is anchored by an ambitious Los Angeles takeover. Gorillaz will perform The Mountain in full at two one-off shows at
Hollywood Palladium on February 22 and 23, followed by the debut, and final-ever run, of House of Kong, a multi-sensory exhibition opening February 26 at Rolling Greens in Downtown L.A.
If The Mountain is about thresholds between life and death, movement and stillness, past and future, Los Angeles becomes its ideal physical manifestation: a city defined by transition, mythmaking, and reinvention.
“Orange County” doesn’t chase the sharp hooks or ironic detachment that once defined Gorillaz at their most cartoonish. Instead, it floats, gently toward something closer to acceptance. It’s not a climax so much as a clearing, a moment where grief loosens its grip and allows momentum to return.
For a band now nearly three decades into its experiment, that restraint feels radical. The end, it turns out, really is just the beginning.