Gorillaz Recorded Their New Album Across India and It Might Be Their Best Yet

Gorillaz just dropped an album recorded across India, and yaar, it is not what you would expect. The Mountain, the band's ninth studio album, was made in studios across Mumbai, Delhi, and Jaipur. It features Asha Bhosle, Anoushka Shankar on sitar, and sarod masters Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash. This is not a token collaboration. It is a full album built around Indian sounds, recorded on Indian soil, with a Metacritic score of 85. Universal acclaim, paisa vasool.

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett came to India in late 2022 after personal losses. Hewlett's mother-in-law suffered a stroke in Jaipur, and grief turned the trip into something far heavier than tourism. The sorrow, the warmth of the people they met, and the music they heard on the streets shaped the whole record. The Mountain sits with mortality and loss, but the Indian instrumentation somehow makes death sound almost joyful.

The standout track is The Shadowy Light. Asha Bhosle sang the Hindi hook Majhi Re Majhi over a swirling arrangement of sarod and electronic textures. She was hesitant to join at first but changed her mind the moment she heard the track. Her voice on this song carries a weight no synthesizer could ever replicate.

How Gorillaz Turned India Into the Sound of The Mountain

Anoushka Shankar's sitar weaves through multiple tracks, adding texture electronic production alone could never achieve. The Bangash brothers bring sarod lines that ground the album in classical Indian tradition even as the beats thump underneath. Flautist Ajay Prasanna appears too, and his contributions feel less like guest spots and more like the foundation the whole album stands on, ekdum solid.

Rolling Stone India's cover story on The Mountain goes deep into how these collaborations happened. Albarn described the process as discovering a musical language he'd always felt connected to but had never properly explored. Critics have compared it to Plastic Beach in ambition, except this one carries the weight of real grief behind it.

Why Gorillaz Recording in India Matters for Desi Music

International artists recording entire albums in India is still rare. Usually it means one Bollywood feature or a sample cleared after the fact. Gorillaz did the opposite. They went to India, stayed, recorded, collaborated with legends, and let Indian music shape the final product.

India's music scene has been having a moment, from the Circoloco Mumbai cancellation drama that shook the EDM world to rap artists breaking out in 30-plus languages. The Mountain proves the world is listening back, yaar, and honestly, it was overdue.

Listening parties for The Mountain were held free in Bengaluru, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, and Mumbai before the album dropped. That kind of India-first rollout for a global act is close to unprecedented, something we saw when classic rock fans went wild over the Scorpions India tour announcement earlier this year.

Gorillaz tapped into something deeper though. They did not just perform here. They created here. Is this the model you want more international artists to follow? Tell us in the comments.

The Mountain is proof Indian music is not a flavour to sprinkle on top. It is a foundation strong enough to hold an entire album together. Asha Bhosle, Anoushka Shankar, and the Bangash brothers were not guests on this record. They were co-architects, poora aur pukka. India's concert circuit keeps growing too, with acts like Calvin Harris' India run making a splash here, catch that story right here on DesiDodo.

Gorillaz recording across India is a genuinely rare move for a band this size. Damon Albarn has always chased the edges of the music map, Mali, Cuba, and now India, but this time the context feels different. It has its own production houses, its own global stars, and a Gen Z audience that knows exactly what it wants.

When a band like Gorillaz embeds itself in that scene rather than sampling it from a distance, the results tend to land with more weight. Indian musicians have spent years watching international artists come in, record a tabla line or a sitar riff, and disappear without credit or royalties. Same old script, yaar.

Gorillaz did not run that script here. The credits sheet names its Indian collaborators down to the background vocalists and engineering assistants, Pari Thakur, Rahul Pandey, and Bharat Singh on tabla among them. That level of credit is rarer than it should be in this industry, and it could do more for Indian session musicians than any Bollywood composer's passing shoutout ever has.

Bhai, this one hits different.

Bhosle passed away on 12 April 2026 at age 92, twelve days before this piece went up, and The Shadowy Light now stands as one of her final recordings. Al Jazeera reported she had been battling exhaustion and a chest infection in her final weeks. Her line about crossing to the other side of the river now sounds less like a lyric and more like a goodbye you will not forget. Rest well, Ashaji, yaar.