For over two decades, English virtual band Gorillaz have built a legacy, not only of hit songs that transcend genres, but also a deep mythos of the virtual bandmates’ lives. Disillusioned by the commercial music industry and the faux personas of the artists working within it, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett created Gorillaz in the late 1990s — a satire band made of fake personas. The four cartoon characters — Murdoc Niccals, 2-D, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs — have gone on a series of wild fictional adventures in the real and imagined world en route to producing Gorillaz’ nine studio albums. Behind the characters, Albarn composes the music and Hewlett animates their stories. In their newest album “The Mountain,” Gorillaz make a powerful return to their rich world of storytelling, exploring themes of death and grieving.

“The Mountain,” released on Feb. 27, grew out of Albarn and Hewlett’s grappling with mortality in the shadow of two life-shaping events: their fathers’ deaths in 2024 and their travels to India afterwards. Albarn and Hewlett found comfort in Eastern philosophies, such as Hinduism, which views death as a cycle of reincarnation rather than a permanent ending. As a result, “The Mountain” is an album of grief, but also an album of life — simultaneously celebrating and mourning the endless changes one endures.

Prior Gorillaz albums have been satirical, dystopian, and full of political commentary, particularly on “Plastic Beach” and “Demon Days.” Yet “The Mountain” turns inward, tackling the crises every individual and family someday confronts through the facing of loss. Rather than grappling with the political, in this new record, Gorillaz take on an intimate yet universal challenge: death.

The Indian influence is audible within the first transcendental notes of the album’s opening, titular track, “The Mountain,” where Gorillaz feature influential Indian artists including Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash, and Ayaan Ali Bangash. Dennis Hopper, an American actor, is also featured on the title track, as one of the many posthumous features on the album. Immediately, “The Mountain” transports the listener into an ethereal, fresh, and somewhat haunting musical world, lush with classical Indian instruments. However, this quickly changes in the following songs.

Both the genre and language of the tracks switch throughout the album, including six languages and genres ranging from classical indian music, to hip-hop, rap, and more. Rather than these changes feeling disruptive, they manage to add more depth to “The Mountain” by showcasing the breadth of grief across time, cultures, and forms of expression.

As the production of the songs shift, so does the meaning, on the spectrum between the pain of loss and peace of acceptance that Albarn and Hewlett set out to explore. This dichotomy is most visible on tracks four and five: “The Hardest Thing (feat. Tony Allen)” and “Orange County (feat. Bizarrap, Kara Jackson and Anoushka Shankar).” Both tracks share the same chorus and melody: “You know the hardest thing / Is to say goodbye to someone you love / That is the hardest thing.” Yet while “The Hardest Thing” opens up with the late Tony Allen speaking Yoruba — “Oya, ẹ dide, ẹrori,” roughly “Get up, we’re almost home” — and features peeled back vocals with haunting instruments, “Orange County” has uplifting background vocals, an upbeat whistling of the melody, and a foot-tapping beat alongside the same lyrics.

As with any Gorillaz album, the hallmark feature is their music video: This time in the form of an eight minute, animated short film “The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God.” Covering the first two tracks and the final track, this video bookends the album in a beautifully drawn film of the four Gorillaz bandmates venturing into the wilderness of the Mountain, the psychedelic world of the Moon Cave, and finally an end sequence where the bandmates dive off into the abyss to the melancholic “The Sad God.” Despite their dive into the unknown, the characters appear at peace.

This final track of the album reintroduces the melody from the title track, yet in a less hopeful, more decisive sound. The character 2-D, or perhaps Albarn himself, implores: “I gave you atoms, you built a bomb / Now there is nothing and I have gone / No more mountains, no more song.”

While “The Mountain” adopts a different tone from their previous works, it flows as an organic continuation — a natural part of growing old is grappling with love and loss, and this holds true for both the characters and the creators behind them. In this album, Gorillaz reconciles the pain of death with the joy of transformation through their genre and language-hopping tracks. They manage to evoke loss and acceptance simultaneously within the lush Indian landscape and craggy peaks atop the mountain of life.