Gorillaz Are Human After All

Shortly before the release of Humanz, Pusha T revealed the organizing principle behind Gorillaz' spectacular fifth album. The rapper appears with Mavis Staples on the song "Let Me Out," in which he imagines the 77-year-old former lead vocalist of the Staple Singers as his mother on the brink of death — and, at the same time, contemplates the U.S. moving out of the hope of the Obama era. Pusha explained on Apple's Beats 1 Radio that Gorillaz' co-conceptualist and primary musician Damon Albarn instructed him to approach the album "like if Trump were to win."

At that stage in the album's creation, the President hadn't even snagged the Republican nomination. But even a cursory listen to this dense, hugely ambitious, emphatically caliginous and yet ultimately uplifting album confirms that much of was conceived with Trump as a possibility. "I told everyone to imagine you're in America after the inauguration," Albarn explained to Q magazine, "and it's the worst-case scenario: How would you feel that night? Let's make a party record about the world going f-cking nuts."