You know you’ve found a special album when you stop putting it on because you fancy hearing a few songs and start putting it on because you fancy hearing the album. That’s Demon Days. You don’t dip into it. You live with it for forty five minutes, then sit there for another five wondering whether to stick it straight back on again. I’ve done that more times than I’d like to admit.
I don’t think Demon Days is the best Gorillaz album because it sold millions, or because every music magazine has spent the last twenty years telling me it is. I think it’s the best because every time I listen to it, I notice something I’ve never heard before. A keyboard tucked away behind the chorus. A strange little noise buried in the mix. A lyric that suddenly means something different now than it did the week before. It’s the sort of record that refuses to stay still.
Most albums show you everything they’ve got within a couple of listens. By the tenth play you’ve worked them out. You know what’s coming, you know which songs you’ll skip and you know where your favourite bit is. Demon Days is a pain in the arse because it doesn’t let you do that. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, some tiny detail sneaks out of the speakers and you’re back where you started.
Loop
I’ve listened to plenty of albums that are technically better made. Plenty that are louder, cleaner, heavier or more ambitious. Very few of them have made me come back like this one has. That’s the thing about Demon Days. It isn’t trying to impress you. It just quietly gets under your skin until one day you realise you’ve spent an entire afternoon with it playing on repeat without even noticing.
For Gorillaz, this wasn’t just another album. This was the moment they stopped being “that cartoon band” and became one of the most important groups of the 2000s. If the debut proved the idea could work, Demon Days proved it could last. More than twenty years later, it still feels just as odd, just as funny, just as bleak and just as exciting as it did in 2005. That’s a rare thing. Music usually ages. This album seems to have dodged the whole process.
Track By Track
Intro / Last Living Souls
The album starts like a zombie film. You get that weird siren thing, a slow build, and then Damon Albarn sounding like he’s just woken up with a hangover at the end of the world. It’s got this sluggish reggae bounce to it, but it’s miserable. It tells you exactly what kind of ride you’re in for. I love it.
Kids With Guns
That bassline. You could build a house on it. It just stalks through the whole song while everything else gets louder, messier, and more frantic around it. By the end, there are about ten different guitars screeching and tearing into each other, and it’s absolute chaos. Brilliant.
O Green World
This sounds like a broken arcade machine. It’s wonky and weird, full of these mad squawking noises and out of tune synths. But underneath the panic and the weirdness, there’s a proper tune holding it all together. It feels panicked and claustrophobic.
Dirty Harry
Putting a primary school choir on a hip-hop beat shouldn’t work. It should sound like a novelty Christmas single. But here, backed by that heavy string section and Bootie Brown tearing through a war torn verse? It’s massive. It’s catchy as hell but still manages to feel completely sinister.
Feel Good Inc.
What is there left to say about this? Everyone knows it. Your gran probably knows the bassline. But strip away the fact that it was played on every radio station on earth, and just listen to it. The manic laughing, the acoustic guitar break that comes completely out of nowhere, De La Soul absolutely having it on the verses. It’s a masterpiece. Period.
El Mañana
You need a breather after Feel Good Inc., and this is it. It’s gorgeous, but it’s incredibly sad. The synths just sort of drift around aimlessly, and Albarn sounds properly heartbroken. It feels like watching the credits roll on a tragic film.
Every Planet We Reach Is Dead
This is my dark horse of the record. It starts off sounding like a blues song played in deep space, and it ends with Ike Turner having an absolute meltdown on the piano. It just gets bigger and messier and louder until it suddenly just cuts out. A sprawling, messy epic.
November Has Come
MF DOOM. That’s it. That’s the review. The beat is so laid back it’s practically horizontal, and DOOM just wanders in, spits one of the best verses on the album, and steals the whole show for three minutes. Cool as fuck.
All Alone
It’s frantic. The beat is twitchy, and Roots Manuva jumps on and makes it sound like a paranoid rush hour in London. Then, right when you’re getting overwhelmed, it drops into this weird, dreamy acoustic bit with Martina Topley Bird before kicking off again. It gives you whiplash in the best way possible.
White Light
Two minutes of drunken punk rock. It’s just “White light! Alcohol! White light!” yelled over a horribly distorted bass. It feels like a pub fight breaking out right before the end of the album.
DARE
Absolute belter. It’s pure pop, but completely weird pop. Shaun Ryder sounds like he wandered into the studio by accident, shouted “IT’S DARE” a few times, and they just left it in because they didn’t know what else to do. You can’t not move to it.
Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head
Dennis Hopper reading a weird bedtime story about a mountain and some oblivious townsfolk. Again, on paper? Stupid. On the record? It’s completely mesmerising. You sit there hanging on every word, waiting for the drop.
Don’t Get Lost In Heaven / Demon Days
You have to take these two together. It’s the grand finale. It starts off like a weird Beach Boys song, all wonky harmonies, and then bleeds straight into Demon Days. The reggae beat comes back, the London Community Gospel Choir steps up, and suddenly you’re in church. It lifts you right up. After 40 minutes of paranoia, dystopia, and weird noises, it ends on pure hope. And then, the strings fade, and it’s over.
And then? You sit there for five minutes, and you put it straight back on.
The Context
Let’s be honest, after the first album, half the music press wrote Gorillaz off as a brilliant novelty act. A cartoon band doing “Clint Eastwood” was cool, but nobody expected it to last. Dan the Automator produced that first one, and it was a great, bouncy record. But for the follow up, Albarn basically binned him. He decided the first album was too “simplistic” and wanted something heavier.
So, who does he call? Danger Mouse. Now, you have to remember that in 2004, Danger Mouse wasn’t this legendary, Grammy hoarding super producer. He was just the bloke who illegally mashed up Jay Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ White Album to make The Grey Album. Albarn essentially handed the keys to his multi million pound cartoon band to a relatively unknown underground DJ famous for a bootleg. It was a massive gamble, but it’s the exact reason Demon Days has that incredibly dense, claustrophobic, hip-hop laced production.
Why It Sounds Like That
But why is the record so brutally bleak? Albarn didn’t just sit in a London pub and decide to be miserable for the sake of it. The entire apocalyptic, end of days vibe was actually sparked by a massive train ride he took with his family from Beijing to Mongolia. He spent a whole day staring out the window at endless dead trees, absolute poverty, and land rapidly turning into dust bowls. He described it as seeing “the world in a state of night”. That wasn’t just a pretentious quote; you can literally hear that exact desolate, forgotten landscape stamped across the entire record.
Then you have to look at what was actually happening when they were recording it in Studio 13 in London. It was the mid 2000s. Post-9/11 paranoia had fully set in, the Iraq War was raging, and the whole country felt incredibly tense and cynical. The album soaked all of that up like a sponge. “Kids With Guns” isn’t just a cool, abstract title—it was literally sparked by a kid bringing a knife into Albarn’s daughter’s primary school. “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” sounds like a weird little bedtime story, but it’s just a thinly veiled, cynical parable about the West invading the Middle East to bleed it dry of oil.
That’s the real genius of Demon Days. It’s a massive, heavy, deeply political reflection of early 2000s dread, disguised as a pop record. They dressed up all this anxiety, violence, and environmental collapse in cartoon monkey suits, gave it a massive bassline, and somehow made millions of people dance to it.
The Verdict
So, what’s the actual verdict?
Look, if you’re still sitting there thinking Gorillaz are just some daft cartoon band that made a few funny music videos, you’re having a laugh. Demon Days is a masterpiece. Plain and simple. It took the darkest, messiest, most anxiety inducing parts of the modern world and turned them into absolute gold.
It’s a record that demands your time. Don’t just stick it on a playlist in the background while you’re doing the dishes or messing about on your phone. Go out, get it on vinyl, drop the needle, and actually sit with it. Let the weirdness wash over you. Let the bassline rattle your ribs.
It’s been over twenty years and it hasn’t aged a single day. Most bands spend their entire careers chasing a record half this good and never even get close. Albarn and Danger Mouse caught absolute lightning in a bottle, painted it black, and somehow made millions of people buy it. Unbelievable. Absolute class.
Rating: 10 / 10
To read more of my music reviews read here.
