Album Review: Gorillaz Dial Up the Desolation on The Now Now

Album Review: Gorillaz Dial Up the Desolation on The Now Now

The Lowdown: With their guest-heavy 2017 album, Humanz, Damon Albarn and Gorillaz embraced the fever of the crowd. In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, songs such as the slow-burning “Andromeda” and the more forceful “Let Me Out” proposed a sort of utopian pop collectivism as the best way forward. The answers that eluded the experts could be found by hanging out with your famous friends in the club, swapping bars and sweat and spit for as long as it took for things to finally make sense. To an almost extreme degree, follow-up The Now Now swerves in the opposite direction. Ostensibly a solo album by the band’s virtual ringleader 2-D, it pares down the guest stars and dials up the sense of desolation one feels when reading the morning paper.

The Good: The closest The Now Now gets to vintage Gorillaz is “Hollywood”, a shameless club banger about the pleasures and perils of trying to make it in Tinsel Town. As you may surmise from the description, the song brings nothing new to the table lyrically, but guest spots from Jamie Principle and Snoop Dogg inject the track with a nimbleness and buoyancy that’s lacking elsewhere on the album. Though he almost pulls a muscle stretching to rhyme “forreal-a” with “gorilla,” Snoop’s verse in particular succeeds at elevating “Hollywood” above the material surrounding it. The problem is that, in doing so, it also shines a light on the album’s general malaise.