Damon Albarn: the tireless singer of Gorillaz and Blur is experiencing a great moment in his career

Paris, France / AFP – The British singer Damon Albarn is going through a great moment in his career: one of his projects, the gorillazreleases a new album this Friday 24th, while his other band, the blurhas announced a return to the stage and is preparing a world tour.

“Icon of music”, the 54-year-old singer “is an artist who remains relevant year after year, just like Gorillaz, who have a prestigious past but remain avant-garde,” says Clément Meyère, festival curator at AFP Parisian We love greenwhere the band performed in 2022.

The eighth Gorillaz album, Cracker Islandmaintains the same hybrid pop style that made the British band known around the world, even if the release features a more upbeat and warm tone than the previous album, Song Machine: Season One – Strange Timezfrom 2020.

The new work also repeats the group’s habit of having numerous collaborations, such as the Puerto Rican one Bad bunny and the Americans Beck AND Stevie Nicksinger of Fleetwood Mac.

The group’s goal remains the same: to feed the fame and mysterious aura of Gorillaz, presented in 2001 as a virtual band, whose music videos only showed animations created by the prestigious artist Jamie Hewlett, author of the comic “Tank Girl”.

“Remove the barriers”

While it soon became public who was behind Gorillaz, that didn’t stop Albarn from repeating the same success he’d enjoyed with Gorillaz blurone of the most successful bands of the 90s.

Big names in world music have attended Gorillaz albums and concerts, such as Elton John, Jean Michel Jarre, Grace Jones and the rapper little simz.

“With Gorillaz on stage, we are immersed in a sound and visual universe that eliminates barriers and builds bridges.

However, the vocalist will put his project on hold in the coming months to focus on the comeback of , who stopped composing and performing regularly in the early 2000s.

The group will go on an international tour that will start in Spain and end in Japan.

Opera singer

Blur had already returned to the stage with the recording of two live albums, All people in 2009 and parklive in 2012.

And the singer always reserves some unusual act for these performances, as, for example, in a show at the cultural center La Gaîté Lyrique, in 2021, when he started improvising and even surprised the musicians who accompanied him.

His creative spirit led him to venture into musical styles away from pop, such as opera or African music.

Among these collaborations is the album Malian music (2002), a joint work with Malian artists, and the opera Le Vol du Boli (2020), promoted alongside one of the best known African filmmakers, the Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, director of the award-winning film Timbuktu (2014).

Source: Terra