It’s a disillusionment that would plague the album. The false icons, not unlike his “Dark Is God” statement, pointed to Albarn’s disillusionment with authority and leadership. The build-up to the album came with a website () which allowed fans to replay the message using stickers or graffiti. Early indications that the LP was shooting for a more focused form of subversion came in the form of early marketing campaigns, led with the phrase “REJECT FALSE ICONS”. The album’s conscience is evident in varying shades of subtlety. Conflict became a staple part of the air we breathed and the pictures we consumed. The world, in the early 00s, was gripped by fear, coverage, and violence, yet seemingly due to battles it never asked to fight. The birth of terrorism on never-before-seen scales, of a post-9/11 atmosphere, of Abu Ghraib and images of torture and execution filling newspapers (real or otherwise), not to mention the dissemination of information via a rapidly growing Internet and the advent of Facebook in 2004. “It's what we're living in basically,” Albarn told MTV News at the time of the album, “the world in a state of night." The project became a fucked up mirror, instead of a fantastical window. What changed between their debut and the release of Demon Days in 2005, was that Albarn started to focus less on creating for Gorillaz a world of their own, and more on using the project as a means to reflect all the shit that was going down in the world around them. Gorillaz seemed like a great idea – or rather, a lot of great ideas – that weren’t quite able to close in on why they existed, or who they existed for. Even at that age I remember skipping backwards and forwards between tracks, never quite falling for the album as a whole. But, like many people, I found the first record a little lacking in something. These skeletal, vacant characters singing listless laments about “sunshine in a bag” – they always had a touch of ‘the end of the world’ about them. As a kid, I was equal parts amused and terrified by the project. Gorillaz self-titled debut album was the first record I ever owned. It was an unprecedented success, but one that has never truly been celebrated as much as it should have been: not just as a pop record, but as possibly the clearest articulation of Damon Albarn’s musical intellect, and a dark, thrilling testament to recent British history both culturally and politically. A top ten album all over the world, entering the UK at number 1, Demon Days vastly outsold the band’s debut record and has since gone on to sell 8 million copies worldwide.
The Gorillaz gimmick, only two albums old at this point, may have been too much of a distraction for the record to be fully canonised at the time, but it didn’t stop it from finding an audience.
In fact, Demon Days tried to tackle major issues so directly, it seemed quite corny, ranty and hysterical at the time – eleven years on, it looks scarily prescient. Of course, many recognised it as a great album, but typically described its merits in terms of “experimentation” – or as Pitchfork put it, “sci-fi kitsch”. At the time, positive reviews called it “a stash of songs that are more fun than a Hong Kong Phooey marathon”, whilst negative ones resolved it as “about as disappointing a follow up as you can imagine”. However, Demon Days was also a pop album released by a fictional gimmick band of four childish cartoon characters – 2D, Russel, Murdoc and Noodle – headed up by a lead singer who most people assumed had seen his best days the wrong side of 1994.
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