Delirium Lyrics – Gorillaz | from “The Mountain”

Gorillaz is scaling wild new peaks with The Mountain, their ninth studio album hitting February 27, 2026, on their own Kong label, and Delirium teams up with the late Mark E. Smith for this swirling post-punk haze that feels like losing your grip on reality in the best way possible.

Tenth in the lineup at around four minutes, Delirium pulls from Gorillaz’s bag of genre-blending tricks—think glitchy electronics tangled with raw guitar snarls and those echoing spoken-word bits that Smith was a master of. It’s got a disorienting edge, all feverish loops and building tension that nods to the delirium of modern overload, where boundaries blur between the virtual and the visceral. Lyrically, it teases fragmented thoughts on chaos and escape, with Smith’s gravelly delivery cutting through like a ghost in the machine, adding that urgent, unpolished fire he brought to The Fall. The creative spark here is pure Albarn: sampling life’s messy overlaps, turning posthumous tapes into something alive and urgent, without forcing the nostalgia.

As an unreleased gem, it’s locked in for that deluxe drop, with Kong handling the rollout and The Orchard pushing it wide. Smith’s feature pulls from archival vocals—raw sessions the band dusted off to honor his wild spirit, as teased in a cryptic Insta clip last week showing waveform spikes over Damascus skyline footage. The full album’s been simmering since September’s “The Happy Dictator” single, with “Damascus” landing December 12 to bump the release up from March. No big label strings this time; it’s Gorillaz going full rogue on their terms.

The Mountain itself is this massive 15-track tapestry, weaving global threads into a summit of sound—English hooks crashing against Hindi flutes, Arabic rhythms, and Yoruba pulses, all under a theme of climbing through cultural echoes and personal ghosts. It opens with the epic “The Mountain” feat. Dennis Hopper and sitar wizard Anoushka Shankar, dives into soulful “The Moon Cave” with Black Thought and Trugoy the Dove’s final whispers, cranks up with IDLES on “The God of Lying,” and peaks in collabs like Trueno and Proof on “The Manifesto” before easing into closers like “The Sad God.” Posthumous nods to Tony Allen, Bobby Womack, and others make it a tribute to the voices that shaped them, all produced by Albarn, Remi Kabaka Jr., James Ford, and Samuel Egglenton.