Entertainment How Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett grew closer together in grief and emerged with the band’s most powerful album Gorillaz co-founder Damon Albarn looks a bit bleary-eyed as he sits in his home in the U.K. battling a bleak British winter. “It’s very hard to believe that the sun exists at the moment. This is our annual act of faith in existence, really,” he amusedly tells Rolling Stone India. You can sense from even offhand comments like that that the artist’s mindspace is quite existential these days. After all, he and fellow creative collaborator Jamie Hewlett have drawn from dread, grief and the joys of life on their ninth studio album The Mountain, out on Feb. 27, 2026 via their own label Kong. Wearing a black cap and white t-shirt adorned with necklaces (including what looks like a mala), Albarn lightens up at different points of our hour-long conversation. “I feel like Murdoc’s sort of exploring sadhu chic at the moment. Whatever that means,” he says with a smile. Gorillaz on the cover of Rolling Stone India’s January-February 2026 cover. Artwork: Gorillaz Picturing the band’s irreverent, skeezy bassist as a wide-eyed, somewhat enlightened ascetic on the ghats of the Ganga is not something any Gorillaz fans would’ve ever imagined. More so for fans in India, this was a crossover that no one saw coming. The band’s India lore first kicked off in a 2023 post, in which the virtual members – Murdoc Niccals, 2-D, Noodle and Russel Hobbs – escaped the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) by getting fake passports and jetting off to Mumbai. The journey that Albarn and Hewlett undertook to create The Mountain – reflected across the virtual band’s mythology over 15 tracks – was one beset with loss and reflection. At the end of 2022, Hewlett was rushing to get his Indian visa and fly to Jaipur from Serbia after his mother-in-law suffered a stroke and went into a coma while she was in the capital of the desert state of Rajasthan with his wife. They ended up spending two months in Jaipur, trying to find a way to fly her home to Paris, even as ICU visits and bouts of infections continued. “It was a very, very traumatic experience, as I’m sure you can imagine, being in a different part of the world with a family member in a coma, trying to get them home. But despite that, I fell in love with Jaipur,” Hewlett admits. “I said to Damon, if we can make an album about death that makes people feel less afraid of the concept of it, wouldn’t that be an amazing gift?” Jamie Hewlett Wearing a faded blue t-shirt and a backwards black cap, he smiles often when I ask him about India and the impression it left on him. “I mean, I should have come back saying, ‘I’m never going to India again after this experience.’ But of course, it was nothing to do with India. It was just that it happened there,” he says. When he got back to London, he spoke to Albarn. “I told him we have to go to India to do a Gorillaz project. And he was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’” They then took their first trip to India together in May 2023, “just discovering and traveling around, trying to imbibe as much of the culture and have as many experiences as possible,” according to Hewlett. Both Albarn and Hewlett have some familiarity with India — as you might expect of British artists, given that generations of Indian diaspora made the U.K. their home in the aftermath of colonial rule. Out in Leytonstone in East London, where Albarn grew up and went on to gain worldwide fame with rock band Blur, he says they lived next to an Indian family and his father often collected and played Indian classical music at home. “My dad used to play me Ravi Shankar [records] from [when I was] a baby […] I felt very at home when I arrived in Mumbai,” Albarn recalls from his first visit. Damon Albarn (left) and Jamie Hewlett (right) on a boat ride through the Ganga river in Varanasi. Photo: Blair Brown There wasn’t a clear theme just yet. After returning to London to further pursue this newfound direction, tragedy struck again when Albarn’s father passed away. Ten days later, Hewlett lost his father. In the coming months, he also lost his mother-in-law, following a prolonged period of illness. The India experience still fresh in their minds, the idea for the next Gorillaz album had taken root – it was about death and the loss of loved ones, not from the “Western perspective” but through the more comforting lens of reincarnation they learnt from Eastern philosophies like Hinduism. Hewlett says, “I said to Damon, if we can make an album about death that makes people feel less afraid of the concept of it, wouldn’t that be an amazing gift?” Considering Gorillaz’s affinity for globe-trotting, surreal adventures, and collabs to back them up, it’s easy to imagine them ending up in India. But not like this. When you hear the opening title track, anchored by Ajay Prasanna’s transportive flute, Anoushka Shankar’s sitar and Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash’s sarod, you immediately get the impression that The Mountain is rooted in something quite real for a virtual band. “I was going to get there at some point,” Albarn says, pointing out how Gorillaz, as well as his other standalone projects, have often drawn from music in African countries like Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Morocco and Congo. “I’ve worked in Damascus, Syria and Algeria […] These journeys don’t start for no reason. There’s a lot of emotional energy that builds up before you embark on a journey like the one that The Mountain depicts,” he explains. Hewlett, for his part, reels off how many places he’s traveled to within India, including New Delhi, Amritsar, Mumbai, Rishikesh and an ayurvedic retreat in Kerala. He and Albarn also later visited Varanasi