Indeed, Baby Queen, which reflects on Damon Albarn’s chance meeting with a young member of Thailand’s royal family at a Blur gig, doesn’t seem at all relevant to the supposed concept. Cracker Island is loosely based around a quasi-religious cult, which seems only tangentially connected to the themes of the title track, Oil and Silent Running – all of which give every impression of being about the perils of the metaverse and living online, “a made-up paradise where the truth was Auto-Tuned” as the title track puts it. As with Plastic Beach and Humanz, it’s a Gorillaz album that comes with a concept attached, although the concept feels even more vague and disconnected from the music than previously. That Gorillaz’s albums don’t automatically go platinum any more is no reflection on their quality, something underlined by Cracker Island. You can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Dirty Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical taste by the fact that Gorillaz are still playing arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the kind of quantities they once sold last year, Billie Eilish said Albarn “changed my life” when she invited him to sing Feel Good Inc with her at Coachella. In truth, their current prevalence probably has more to do with trying to game the streaming services’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s influence, but still. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur these days, but we live in an era when pop is fuelled by the kind of cross-genre collaborations that started popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had more or less consumed their output entirely by the release of 2010’s Plastic Beach.
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