During a lengthy interview with NME, Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn spoke particularly about his new record, new Gorillaz music and a potential Blur reunion this week. 

Albarn said to NME that his new album ‘The Nearer The Fountain, The More Pure The Stream’ was influenced by the pandemic. He explained that “Obviously March came last year and that was the end of everything. What I was left with was all of this great rehearsal recording from just a mic in the room. I just felt like the beginning of this year was so grim and I had to do something to lift me out of those, I wouldn’t call doldrums, but storms – those terrible north wind storms that you get down by the sea in Devon sometimes. They come down off the Atlantic from Greenland, they spin round, and they’re brutal. I got together with a couple of my old friends who I’ve been making music with for a long time – Simon Tong and Mike Smith – and just tried to nail everything into some kind of cohesive meditation about particles, now and the future.”

The new album, Albarn states, was finished in February and he’s been working on other projects in the intervening months, telling NME  that he’s “been working on carnival-themed music with Gorillaz with a lot of people from west London…We’re really going back to the spirit of the first record.” The first record, self-titled Gorillaz, featured hit songs ‘Clint Eastwood’ and ‘19-2000’. Albarn enjoyed working on the project as a departure from ‘Nearer The Fountain’, saying “It’s really exciting and we’ve been really enjoying it. It’s a nice kind of counter-balance to ‘The Nearer The Fountain…’, really. I’ve definitely needed a dose of something else after I finished that record. Steel pan drums and Casio MT-40s were always going to be a good cure.”

The musician also hinted at an upcoming Blur reunion, saying that the band had “a chat recently, but we haven’t progressed further than that….we did have an idea though, I’ve just been a bit busy at the moment obviously. When it happens, I’ll be made up.”