Gorillaz Merch
Gorillaz Merch - Gorillaz (2001–2002
From 1998 to 2000, Albarn recorded for Gorillaz’ self-titled debut album at his newly opened Studio 13 in London as well as at Geejam Studios in Jamaica. The sessions resulted in the band’s first release, the EP Tomorrow Comes Today, released on 27 November 2000.
This EP consisted mostly of tracks which later appeared on the album, and it also included the band’s first music video for “Tomorrow Comes Today”, which introduced the virtual band members for the first time.
With Gorillaz, Albarn began to branch out into other genres which he had not explored with Blur, such as hip-hop, dub and Latin music, a process he described as liberating: “One of the reasons I began Gorillaz is I had a lot of rhythms I never thought I could use with Blur. A lot of that stuff never really seemed to manifest itself in the music we made together as Blur.
Damon Albarn
Damon Albarn, (born March 23, 1968, Whitechapel, London, England), English musician who found fame as the front man for the rock band Blur and as the main creative force behind the pop group Gorillaz but was also noted for his eclectic output as a composer, producer, and collaborator.
Albarn, whose parents were involved in London’s creative counterculture, spent his early years in the East End before moving with his family to Colchester, Essex, in 1978. As a youth he learned to play the violin and the piano, and in secondary school he befriended Graham Coxon, with whom he soon began to write and perform songs.
Following a brief stint in drama school, Albarn formed a rock band that eventually became known as Blur. With Albarn as lead vocalist and principal songwriter, the group—which also included Coxon (guitar), Alex James (bass), and Dave Rowntree (drums)—issued its debut album, Leisure, in 1991. Having established itself as clever observers of everyday British life, in the tradition of the Kinks and the Small Faces, on Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Blur achieved a critical and commercial breakthrough with Parklife (1994), a winning collection of pop songs in that vein.
By the mid-1990s Blur was a chief exemplar, along with fellow melodic-rock revivalists Oasis, of what was called Britpop, and a frenzied media-fueled rivalry emerged between the two bands. Partially in response, Albarn and company shifted course after The Great Escape (1995) and returned with Blur (1997), a garage-rock-indebted record that expanded their American audience, and the stylistically varied 13 (1999).