Demon Days is the second studio album by the British virtual band Gorillaz. It was released on 11 May 2005 in Japan, 23 May 2005 in the United Kingdom by Parlophone, and 24 May 2005 in the United States by Virgin Records. The album was recorded at Studio 13, based in London, United Kingdom, and was primarily produced by Danger Mouse, alongside the band themselves, Jason Cox, and James Dring. The album features guest appearances from De La Soul, Neneh Cherry, Martina Topley-Bird, Roots Manuva, MF Doom, Ike Turner, Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde, Shaun Ryder, and Dennis Hopper.
The album continues the band's musical approach of incorporating a wide variety of genres and styles, including alternative rock, hip-hop, pop, trip hop and art rock. Its lyrics and tone are darker than those of the band's eponymous debut album (2001), addressing apocalyptic and post-9/11 political themes. Gorillaz frontman and co-creator Damon Albarn has described it as a loose concept album exploring "the world in a state of night", citing as inspiration a trip he took through impoverished areas of rural China. As with the band's previous album, the release of Demon Days was promoted across various multimedia, including interactive websites, animated music videos, and animatics created by Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett and his production company Zombie Flesh Eaters. The album produced four singles: "Feel Good Inc.", "Dare", "Dirty Harry", and the double A-side "El Mañana" / "Kids with Guns".
Demon Days was a major commercial success, debuting at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number six on the US Billboard 200. The album has sold eight million copies worldwide, surpassing sales of the band's debut album. It was later certified six times platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US. Lead single "Feel Good Inc." topped the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for eight consecutive weeks and won the band its sole Grammy Award in 2006 for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Forgoing a traditional tour, the band promoted the album with concert residencies in Manchester and New York City billed as Demon Days Live, performing the album in full across five shows in each city. During these performances, which featured almost all of the guest artists on the album, Albarn and the band performed on stage in silhouette alongside a screen displaying Hewlett's visuals. As with the band's first album, B-sides and outtakes from the album's sessions were later released as a compilation album, D-Sides (2007), while the album's music videos and assorted multimedia were compiled into the video album Phase Two: Slowboat to Hades (2006).
Demon Days received positive reviews upon release, with reviewers noting that the album established Gorillaz as a serious musical project as opposed to a one-off side effort. It has since garnered further acclaim as one of the best Gorillaz albums and one of the greatest albums of the 21st century, with particular praise for its eclectic genre-bending musical style, prescient postmodern themes and dark, haunting atmosphere. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Demon Days number 437 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Background While Jamie Hewlett was working with his team on a script for a possible Gorillaz movie, Damon Albarn was still recording Think Tank with Blur. By the time Albarn was ready to start writing and recording material for the Gorillaz movie, the whole idea had already been scrapped, although ideas from the movie's script were still used, including the themes of being driven by ego and the world being trapped in an endless night. Despite this, the album's main source of inspiration actually came about as a result of Albarn's train journey from Beijing to Mongolia where he, his partner and six-year-old daughter spent a day travelling through what Albarn describes as a "weird, unspoken, forgotten part of China. It was basically dead trees as far as the eye can see." Albarn recalls:
Albarn stated in an interview with MTV News that "Gorillaz make dark pop; that's what they always set out to achieve. The whole album kind of tells the story of the night – staying up during the night – but it's also an allegory. It's what we're living in basically, the world in a state of night."
Hewlett was excited by the prospect of a second Gorillaz album, saying, "Let's repeat the same process, but do it better. Because everyone thought it was a gimmick. If you do it again, it's no longer a gimmick, and if it works then we've proved a point. And instantly, all of us got excited".
Recording
The most obvious difference on the band's second offering is the absence of Dan "the Automator" Nakamura as the acting musical producer. Instead, Albarn reached out to Danger Mouse based on the strength of The Grey Album, which brought Danger Mouse to prominence for mixing Jay-Z's The Black Album. "Dan [the Automator] wasn't busy, the project just needed a slightly different approach," Albarn explained. "Danger Mouse, in my opinion, is one of the best young producers in the world. I think the last record was a lot more simplistic. It was virgin territory – animated hip-hop, reggae, stroke-rock, Latin rock – there's a lot more intricacy with this record." For the major part of recording Demon Days, Albarn returned to Unit 13 at Buspace Studios, where he recorded a huge part of Gorillaz' self-titled debut album. Danger Mouse joined the project on 7 April 2004. Danger Mouse was a longtime fan of Albarn's other band Blur, the feelings of admiration and respect were mutual. "It was a no-brainer when there was interest there from Damon," Burton said. "I heard demos of the new record, but the biggest part was getting the chance to be a part of something that's so strong – you just gotta jump on it. I had a very up-and-down year [in 2004], but it was definitely a big up when I got a chance to [work with Gorillaz]."
"I learned so much working on the record with Damon", claimed Danger Mouse. "...and it was sink or swim. You just pick it up. At the end of the day, the people you're working with – whether it's the choir or string section or guitarist – are specialized in what they do. All you have to do is figure out the best thing they're doing and how it's going to fit within the context of the whole project. That goes back to putting together a song on a computer-based program. You're looking for all the parts that are going to make something sound right. It's also being able to communicate. I had done stuff before Gorillaz – like the Pelican City stuff – where I worked with musicians, so it wasn't completely foreign to me."
As on Gorillaz, there are plenty of guest collaborators, including rappers De La Soul, Bootie Brown from the Pharcyde, and MF Doom along with Ike Turner on keyboards, the singer Shaun Ryder from Happy Mondays and the actor and director Dennis Hopper, who narrates a parable ("Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head") about innocence, greed and retribution set to a droll reggae bounce. That song leads into a stretch of ethereal vocal harmonies, in a clear homage to the Beach Boys. Albarn said he couldn't make the vocal parts sound right until he had a minor revelation. "If you've ever seen the Beach Boys in footage, they're all smiling, desperately keeping the upbeat Beach Boy thing alive, while Brian Wilson is just absolutely glum as hell. So I did three harmonies smiling with my face. And then one just being really miserable, which was Brian. Now it's got that vibe." Hopper can also be heard on the title track of the band's ninth studio album The Mountain, which utilises an unused outtake from Hopper's appearance on "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head".
The recording of Dennis Hoppers narration was done at EMI Music Publishing Studio, also known as EMI Demo studio, which can be seen in the Gorillaz' documentary Bananaz. When asked in a Reddit AMA about working with Hopper, Albarn said "we did it in a cobbled back street in a basement studio owned by emi pubilshing next to the Astoria theatre in London which is sadly no more...To be honest i was incredibily shy to talk to him. i was given the opportunity to meet him at an award ceremony at hackney empire, and when my chance came i hid behind a pillar in the theatre, and when i thought the coast was clear i stepped out from behind it and accidently bumped into him and then i had to pop the question , it turned out his son Henry was a big fan and i think thats why he did it. He was very sweet and a absolutely lovely guy.."
"Kids with Guns" was inspired by a boy in Albarn's daughter's class who turned up to school with a knife. "A nice boy", said Albarn, "just decided to pick up a knife and show it to his friends at lunchtime. It's a very real problem, but I'm not treating it as a problem. It's part of the brutalisation of a generation that's going on at the moment". "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head", meanwhile, is a parable read by Dennis Hopper that seems to have clear parallels with the war for oil.
Regarding the song "Dare" and the collaboration with Shaun Ryder, Albarn also said: "I love Shaun Ryder. During the whole Oasis thing, he and Bernard Sumner were the only two who cared about what I was going through. Being constantly taken the piss out of by Noel & Liam (Gallagher). How can you fight when you've got the tabloids and a working class attitude on your back? You're fucked. But Shaun was really sweet to me and made me feel a whole lot better about it. Because I did get quite upset about it, so was selecting Shaun karma in action, then? Yeah, definitely". The song's title is purported to have come about due to Ryder's thick Mancunian accent; he was unable to say the phrase "It's There", which was the song's original title, so it was changed simply to "Dare". Roses Gabor takes over the role of Noodle from Miho Hatori, who provided the vocals for her on the first album. Albarn provides backing vocals; however, to blend his vocals with Gabor's, his voice was toned down to be slightly covered up. Albarn's full vocalization can be heard on the D-Sides remix album. D-Sides features a demo version of "Dare" entitled "People". This version contains the same background beat while lacking the majority of the keyboards and effects in the final recording. Unlike the final version, it is completely sung by Albarn and features an Omnichord breakdown.
Rapper Roots Manuva and Martina Topley-Bird appear on the track "All Alone" (the instrumental of which was partially recorded in Africa) and also recorded another track entitled "Snakes and Ladders". The track does not appear on the album or D-Sides, however, the track was sampled by Topley-Bird for her song "Soldier Boy", which appears as a B-side for her song "Poison" which features Roots Manuva and features a production credit for Gorillaz. Although the track was not used on Demon Days or D-Sides, the line "Who put the chemicals in food chain?", said by Manuva in the song, was sampled on the album track 'Intro'. The recording of 'Snakes and Ladders' can be seen on the Gorillaz documentary Bananaz where the sampled line is called "an amazing hook" by Albarn.
Then from October to November 28th 2004, the team working on Demon Days moved Pierce Room Studios, also known as Pierce Entertainment, to complete overdubs and final mixing. From January 10th to 12th, the album was mastered at Masterdisk, in New York, by Howie Weinberg.
Musical style and themes