Demon Days

Released 23 May 2005 via Parlophone, Demon Days began as a feature film that never got made. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett turned it into Gorillaz's second album once the studio executives passed. Danger Mouse took over production from Dan the Automator, joining in April 2004 while still notorious for The Grey Album, and the record was cut in London across that year. Albarn's train ride through Mongolia set its mood. The result is a dark pop concept album about a world going sour: oil running out, war after 9/11, religion bent into a weapon, people alone in a crowd. Danger Mouse holds it together with heavy drums and a cold, dusty low end, and the music grows stranger as it goes.

The guest list should collapse under its own weight. Neneh Cherry drifts through "Kids with Guns," Bootie Brown raps "Dirty Harry" over the San Fernandez Youth Chorus, and De La Soul cackle across "Feel Good Inc." Ike Turner hammers the piano solo on "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead," MF Doom slips into "November Has Come," and Roots Manuva and Martina Topley-Bird share "All Alone," a skittering hip-hop cut that dissolves into a haze. Shaun Ryder and Rosie Wilson trade lines on "Dare," Dennis Hopper narrates "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head" like a bedtime story gone wrong, and the London Community Gospel Choir lifts the closing pair. Every one of them lands in a space Danger Mouse cut to fit.

"Feel Good Inc." won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals and spent eight consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the US Modern Rock chart, and "Dare" went to No. 1 in the UK. The album entered the UK chart at No. 1 and has sold around eight million copies worldwide. Two decades on, its critique reads as eerily prescient. It is Albarn's bleakest pop record, and his most generous.

European CD in a jewel case, new and sealed.