Gorillaz’s cracker island
By: Enya Xiang
The gritty electropop album Cracker Island chronicles the adventures of Gorillaz, the animated band and brainchild of musician Damon Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett. In the duo’s eighth studio album, protagonists Murdoc, 2-D, Russel, and Noodle settle in sunny Los Angeles and find themselves drawn into a religious cult and faced with black magic and the supernatural.
Something sinister lurks in Hollywood, preventing Gorillaz from kicking back and relaxing. Beneath its magical realism, Cracker Island criticises the modern digital age. “All of us are living in a world where we're being separated from one another into cults”, claims Hewlett in an AFP interview. Cracker Island presents a technological dystopia driven by surveillance and instant gratification. Yet despite the bleakness of the human-versus-machine struggle, Gorillaz still prophesies that humankind will prevail: our humanity is both our undoing and saving grace.
The metanarrative of the album follows the witness testimony of an escaped cult member. In Afrofuturistic opener ‘Cracker Island’, 2-D confesses to destructive tendencies and missing self-control: “In the end, I had to pay / I purged my soul”. He continues in ‘Silent Running’, comparing cult conformity to doom-scrolling over a hefty synth-funk track: “Through the infinite pages I’ve scrolled out / Searching for a new world / That waits on the sunrise”.
In this setting of technological alienation, ‘Oil’ reminds listeners that compassion makes us whole. Stevie Nicks’ husky, razored contralto joins Albarn’s robotic tone. Peppering whimsical lyrics with computer jargon, the duo tells a love story about “fairy-like companions” who find each other in the digital sphere. The track’s metaphor attests that love fills up human beings as oil fills up robots.
The dream-pop ‘Baby Queen’ interrupts Gorillaz’s cult saga. Albarn wrote the eccentric ballad based on a reoccurring dream of the Thai princess whom he met in 1997. In an interview with Los Angeles Times, he recalls how the teenage princess “stood on her throne and stage-dived into the crowd” at one of his concerts with Blur. Albarn’s princess is made of stardust, a refreshing break from Gorillaz’s fabricated vision of California. Her saintlike majesty, like “the mirrored lights of our dreams”, fits into the lucid dream created on Cracker Island.
Kevin Parker of Tame Impala and rapper Bootie Brown star in the psychedelic track ‘New Gold’, which unmasks the artifice of the American Dream. Brown warns, “Watch out from the coast, Paul Revere / We all play our part in the devil’s cheer” as Parker’s trance-like voice murmurs that often, whatever fortune one finds is merely fool’s gold and trickery. The song envisions an American nightmare of glamour, Botox, fast cars, and billionaire tech bros, joking about a liposuction scheduled for Granny.
In the gentle finale, ‘Possession Island’, the band members rediscover their companionship. The call-and-response between Albarn and rap-folk experimentalist Beck is a quiet reminder that kindness forms a powerful connective tissue that strengthens humanity. Mariachi instrumentals play jubilantly over a bittersweet exit scene. The four friends escape the cult and set up their next enterprise.
Cracker Island is a classic Gorillaz production, bending genre and collaborating with an unpredictable guest lineup. The band’s eighth album is already in “Phase 7”, the seventh stage in the Gorillaz space-time continuum. Once revolutionary, Albarn and Hewlett’s experimentation with electropop, reggaeton, and alt-rock is now an established style and feels more reassuring than subversive. Cracker Island plays it safe, but its absurdist tech dystopia is anything but boring. Gorillaz demonstrates its hyperawareness of modernity through sharp cultural insights, which are always ahead of the curve.