The Demon Days That Gave Us 'Humanz'

Some time last year, Noodle, Gorillaz's scrappy lead guitarist and sole female member, decided it was time to get the band back together. Things had been in disarray since the ill-fated attack on the band's Plastic Beach—a garbage island they wouldn't have even been if it weren't at Noodle's urging for a 2010 reunion. The foursome was separated, and Noodle wound up in Japan, working for a pearl diver, and, while on the job, she accidentally released a shape-shifting demon that she found at the bottom of the ocean. Noodle spent years tracking said demon, which infiltrated Tokyo's criminal underworld, before it ultimately met its demise by decapitation at Noodle's katana-wielding hands. So where did she go from there? She put herself in a cardboard box addressed to Murdoc of course, and shipped herself off to London. Thus begins the story of Humanz, Gorillaz newest album.

What happens in the long gaps between Gorillaz albums is complicated if the band's mythology is to be believed. While Noodle was battling Japanese demons/mafia dons, the band's leader and bass player, Murdoc, went on a trans-continental bender. Drummer Russel was blown up 60 times his original size and found himself in Pyongyang, where the lack of food brought him back down to normal size. Vocalist/pianist 2-D was eaten by a giant whale and spent a significant amount of time inside its belly. There is much more to the story, which you can read about exhaustively on the Gorillaz Wiki, as well as on the band's Instagram, where the more recent parts of the story have played out.

In reality, the reason it's taken the band so long to make a followup to Plastic Beach is fairly simple. Creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have said that it takes a very long time to create an album and design the accompanying visuals, and by the time the process is complete, they're ready to do other things. The band's literal humans also had a falling out several years back, which had left the fate of the Gorillaz uncertain since Plastic Beach and its digital-only followup The Fall. For a while, it seemed unlikely that there would ever be a new chapter in the canon that would see the gang back together for another album at all. But now we're just days away from the release of Humanz, and, as both the real and imagined threads go, both the band's human and cartoon components have been through the ringer to get here.

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