Gorillaz

Gorillaz Return With An Album Date, A Video, And Creepy Cgi Portraits

... a name and a release date. Humanz, the band’s third full-length album, will be available on April 28 th. Along with that info, the band has posted a new video and a collection of portraits of its fictional members. Gorillaz is an experiment by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett that mixes music, marketing, and animated art. The two members, along with a handful of collaborators, are represented publicly by four virtual characters: 2 D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs. When the band launched in 1998, the characters and their world were portrayed in music videos, the band’s website, and limited live performances. But the idea of Gorillaz feels better suited for 2017, when fictional characters having their own social media accounts is common practice. Their new portraits, which step a little too close to the uncanny valley, are designed like Twitter avatars. But these aren’t the new designs, per se. The band isn’t limited to human bodies, so its ...

Gorillaz, Father John Misty, Kendrick ? , And Much More

... the wiles of the doomed Tsarist Russian swindler Rasputin, but the pleading emotional intensity and soulful singing of cuts like “Word to the Wise” are just as powerful as any swords and sorcery. —Craig Jenkins. Arca, Arca (April 7). Venezuelan producer Arca makes captivating, claustrophobic electronic music and videos that are terrifying yet strikingly beautiful by turns, but more often all at once. His third album, Arca, blesses another array of bewitching productions with the angelic singing that anchored “Sin Rumbo,” off last year’s Entrañas, and lyrics about doomed love and transformation sung in Spanish. Arca’s cryptic audio-visual experiences will no doubt push the producer’s solo work up into the rarefied space occupied by forward-thinking multimedia auteurs like Björk and Anohni. —CJ. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy (April 7). Come for the existential musings, esoteric social commentary , “generic” pop songs , and acid trips; stay for the mass spillage of word vomit from all future Father John Misty interviews that his new album will happily provide us. —DL. Joey Bada$, ...