Damon Albarn is switching things up on the next Gorillaz album.
The hitmaker may be immersed in all things Blur ahead of the release of the band’s latest album, ‘The Ballad Of Darren’, and European tour dates, but behind the scenes he’s already masterminding his next project.
Speaking on the ‘Broken Record’ podcast, the Girls & Boys singer revealed he and Jamie Hewlett are already busy on the follow-up to 2023’s ‘Cracker Island’.
“I’ve done a few tunes. It’s not going to be as dramatic as a quantum shift, it will be a paradigm shift, it will be very different,” he shared. “It will be an entirely different approach to everything — to the band, to everything.
“We’re at a point where we’re going to change. Why? Because it was always just Jamie and I. Although it is a very big thing now, it is still, in essence, just two people.
“If we decided between us that we want to do something unrecognisable then we will. You need that for it to stay alive, really.”
He’s also working on an opera, putting 1807’s ‘The Magic Flute Part II’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – the sequel to Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ – to music for the first time.
“I’m doing an opera at the moment, using Goethe’s fragment he wrote about The Magic Flute Part II, which is fascinating,” continued to Parklife star. “You’ve heard of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’? Well, Goethe, who is a contemporary of Mozart, wrote ‘Part II’ of that — the sequel — but it never got put to music.
“It’s this legendary lost thing… [But] I don’t really know what I’m doing. I never know what I’m doing in that world, I’m a complete idiot. I don’t know if it’s any good.”
The band – also starring Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Alex James – is set to perform a run of shows across Europe throughout the summer in support of their new album, which the frontman describes as “an aftershock record” and a “reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now”.
“The older and madder we get, it becomes more essential that what we play is loaded with the right emotion and intention. Sometimes just a riff doesn’t do the job,” adds Graham.
Bassist Alex notes that “for any long term relationship to last with any meaning you have to be able to surprise each other somehow and somehow we all continue to do that,” while Dave admits their reunion only feels “natural”.
“With every record we do, the process reveals something new and we develop as a band. We don’t take that for granted,” he explains.
The artwork for the album features an image of Gourock lido in Renfrewshire by British photographer Martin Parr.
‘The Ballad of Darren’ is available to pre-order now.
Tracklist: Blur – The Ballad Of Darren
1. The Ballad
2. St Charles Square
3. Barbaric
4. Russian Strings
5. The Everglades (For Leonard)
6. The Narcissist
7. Goodbye Albert
8. Far Away Island
9. Avalon
10. The Heights
Buy ‘The Ballad of Darren’ on CD and Vinyl.
