Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez

Damon Albarn launched Gorillaz's Song Machine at the dawn of 2020, planning to release one new song a month, then rounding up the results as an almanac at the end of the year. Despite the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Albarn managed to more or less stick to his schedule, issuing a new song a month until the October release of Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez. As the project was started prior to the pandemic, Strange Timez isn't strictly a reflection of life in the time of the coronavirus; parts of it even feature musicians who passed not long after their contribution, such as Tony Allen, whose "How Far?" concludes the deluxe edition of the album. Nevertheless, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez does pulse to the strange, ominous rhythms propelling a world beset by political strife and illness, often finding solace in retro stylings that conjure the gleaming 1980s and pan-global optimism of Y2K in equal measure. In other words, Strange Timez may have followed a different template than previous Gorillaz albums, but it is unmistakably a Gorillaz album, a record that hides its melancholy among a series of sunny, genre-bending fusions. By its very nature, the album is dotted with cameos -- there are more here than there were on 2018's The Now Now, which was largely fronted by Albarn himself -- and the likes of Robert Smith, Beck, St. Vincent, Elton John, 6lack, Fatoumata Diawara, and Peter Hook help pull the album away from the realm of solipsism, suggesting that even when the world is largely isolated from itself, there is still the common language of music that binds us all. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine