You know when an uncle gets a new hobby out of nowhere and won’t shut up about it for six months? One week he’s making his own sourdough, the next he’s bought an expensive road bike and he’s wearing tight lycra to the supermarket. That is Damon Albarn. The man simply cannot sit still. He can’t just sit in a room with an acoustic guitar and a cuppa like a normal bloke; he has to invent a fake island, hire a whole cult, and fly out to Los Angeles to record an album with people who wear sunglasses indoors. That’s how we ended up with Cracker Island.
Going to Los Angeles is usually the beginning of the end for British musicians. Something in the air over there probably a mix of exhaust fumes, fake tan, and $15 smoothies makes normal people forget how to write a simple, rough around the edges tune. They get into a studio with big glass windows, look at the palm trees, and suddenly everything has to sound super shiny, super clean, and smoothed out like a plastic garden table.
And that’s the main problem here. It’s supposed to be a record about how fake, shallow, and weird the modern world is with everyone staring at their phones all day. But because it was made in LA with a producer named Greg Kurstin who usually makes massive radio pop for people like Adele the album ends up sounding just as shiny and polished as the exact things Damon is complaining about.
Track by Track Breakdown
1. Cracker Island (feat. Thundercat)
It starts off on an absolute high, to be fair. The title track is everything a modern Gorillaz song should be. You’ve got Thundercat on bass, and the man plays the thing like a tiny guitar slapping the strings so fast it sounds like a bowling ball bouncing down a flight of wooden stairs in a dead rhythmic way. It’s fast, it’s bouncy, and Damon’s singing sounds proper loose and cool. Lyrically, he sets up this weird cult on a beach worshiping fake truths. You listen to this first tune and you think, “Right, here we go, this is going to be a proper belter.”
2. Oil (feat. Stevie Nicks)
Then track two starts, the Cracker Island album runs at full speed into a closed double glazed door. “Oil” features actual Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac. Now, if you somehow manage to get Stevie Nicks in your studio, you turn her microphone up as loud as it goes and you let her sing until the windows rattle. What does Damon do? He buries her voice so deep under layers of soft synth noise that she sounds like she’s trapped inside a cupboard down the hall. She’s basically just humming in the background while Damon sings a soft, floaty melody that goes nowhere. It’s like hiring Gordon Ramsay to come to your house just to butter a piece of toast. A total waste of time.
3. The Tired Influencer
This is where the album gets proper preachy. Look, we all know people spend too much time on their phones. My gran knows it. The bloke at the newsagent knows it. You don’t need a cartoon monkey band from London to tell you that looking at a cracked screen all day makes your brain feel like warm porridge. The beat sounds like the music they play in the background of a commercial for a holiday cruise you can’t afford, complete with fake bird noises in the background. It’s so soft and gentle it practically puts you to sleep.
4. Silent Running (feat. Adeleye Omotayo)
If you’ve ever sat on the top deck of a late night bus going home in the freezing cold when it’s raining outside and you’ve lost your umbrella, this song is the soundtrack to that exact feeling. It’s slow, it’s sad, and Damon’s voice sounds genuinely gutted. He’s singing about being lost in the dark, and when the backing singer Adeleye Omotayo comes in at the end with a massive gospel choir sound, the song actually lifts you off your seat. It builds up slow, the bass gets heavier and heavier, and for four minutes, you forget that the rest of the record is trying so hard to be a radio pop album. Brilliant stuff.
5. New Gold (feat. Tame Impala & Bootie Brown)
“New Gold” has Kevin Parker from Tame Impala and Bootie Brown from The Pharcyde on it. Now, Kevin Parker makes music that sounds like someone spilled a strawberry milkshake over a synthesizer in 1975. It’s very catchy, very sticky, but it doesn’t sound like a Gorillaz song at all. It just sounds like a Tame Impala song where Damon Albarn happened to wander into the room while holding a microphone. Bootie Brown drops a verse, but he sounds dead polite, like he’s trying not to wake up the baby next door. Where’s the energy? Where’s the grit? Catchy chorus, mind, but a bit safe.
6. Baby Queen
This track actually has a dead funny story behind it. Back in the 90s, when Damon was in Blur, they played a gig in Thailand and the actual 14 year old Princess of Thailand showed up. They had to put a literal golden throne on the side of the stage for her while these four sweaty British lads blared out loud indie rock. Decades later, Damon had a dream about meeting her again and wrote a song about it. The tune sounds like it was recorded underwater. It’s slow, floaty, and weirdly lovely, like drifting off on a lilo in a swimming pool while someone plays a keyboard softly in the house next door.
7. Tarantula
“Tarantula” comes next and it sounds like 1985 in a blender. It’s got that fast, snappy drum machine beat that sounds like early New Order. The lyrics are all about heartbreak and feeling stuck in a rut, but the music is bright and punchy. It’s an alright tune, but again, the production is so clean you could eat your dinner off it. It lacks that bit of grease and dirt that made classic Gorillaz songs sound so cool.
8. Tormenta (feat. Bad Bunny)
This track feels like someone accidentally swapped the CD in your car while you weren’t looking. Bad Bunny is currently the biggest pop star on the planet, so putting him on the record makes sense if you’re trying to sell millions of copies, but the song is straight up reggaeton. It sounds like you’ve suddenly been dropped into a beach bar in Mexico with a drink that has a little paper umbrella in it. Bad Bunny does his thing, Damon pops up for about ten seconds in the middle to sound sad, and then he disappears again. It doesn’t fit the rest of the record at all. It feels like a song chucked on at the last second just to get a load of Spotify streams.
9. Skinny Ape
The absolute best moment on Cracker Island and the moment that saves it from being a total snooze fest is “Skinny Ape”. It starts off really quiet. Just Damon and a little acoustic guitar, sounding like an old man complaining about how fast the world is moving. You think, “Oh great, another slow ballad.” But then a little electronic drum beat starts ticking away in the background. The volume starts creeping up. You can feel something coming.
And then, right around the two minute mark, the whole track absolutely explodes. The tempo doubles, this massive electro punk bassline kicks the door down, and the song turns into an absolute riot. Damon starts shouting, the drums are pounding like a brick inside a washing machine on the spin cycle, and for two glorious minutes, the album loses its mind. It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s messy, and it’s the only time on the whole record where Gorillaz feel like a real, dangerous, unpredictable band again.
10. Possession Island (feat. Beck)
After the carnage of “Skinny Ape”, we finish on a quiet piano song with Beck called “Possession Island”. It’s just Damon and Beck singing soft harmonies together about how “we’re all in this together till the end.” Towards the end, some sad acoustic guitars and a Spanish brass section slowly carry the song out. It’s fine. It’s nice. It sounds like the music that plays over the end credits of a sad movie about a dog, but it doesn’t really give the album the massive ending it needed.
Strengths & Weaknesses
To keep it simple, here is what actually works on this record and what completely flops.
The Strengths
- Peak Highs: When it hits, it really hits. The title track, “Silent Running”, and “Skinny Ape” are up there with some of the best stuff Damon has written in the last ten years.
- Thundercat’s Bass: The opening track’s bassline carries enough energy to power a small village.
- Proper Melodies: Even on the boring tracks, Damon Albarn physically cannot write a terrible vocal melody. The man just knows how to write a hook, even when he’s on autopilot.
The Weaknesses
- Wasted Legends: Getting Stevie Nicks on a track and burying her in the background mix is a crime against music.
- Squeaky Clean Production: LA producer Greg Kurstin took all the rough, gritty, rain soaked British character out of the music and made it sound like an ad for an iPhone.
- Preachy Lyrics: We don’t need a middle aged millionaire telling us that staring at phones is bad through songs that sound like cruise ship background noise.
- Zero Cohesion: Throwing a random reggaeton track with Bad Bunny right near the end breaks whatever small storyline the album was trying to build.
The Final Verdict
When you finish listening to Cracker Island, you don’t feel angry, but you don’t feel blown away either. You just feel a bit… fine.
And “fine” is a terrible word for a Gorillaz record. This is the band that gave us giant floating windmills, zombie apes, rap icons, punk legends, and weird cartoon lore that felt like a proper comic book come to life. Those old records felt like someone dragged a bunch of weird instruments out of a dusty attic, plugged them into broken amps, and smelled like a rain soaked bus stop in London.
Cracker Island doesn’t smell like a rainy bus stop. It smells like air conditioning and expensive hand sanitizer. It feels like going out to a fancy restaurant, paying £30 for a tiny piece of fish, and walking out thinking, “Yeah, it was alright, but I’d rather have had a proper chip bap.”
It’s not rubbish. “Cracker Island” is great, “Silent Running” is a masterpiece, and “Skinny Ape” is a proper riot. But as a full album? It’s just too tidy. It’s an album made by a bloke who went to California, had a nice time in the sun, and forgot that the best British music always comes from a bit of noise, a bit of rain, and a lot of mess.
Verdict: 6.5 / 10
To read more of my album reviews read here.
