Gorillaz have released a deluxe edition of new album ‘Cracker Island’ featuring an additional five tracks – listen below.
The band’s star-studded new album came out last week (February 24), and Sunday (February 27) saw the band expand the record with a number of bonus tracks.
Included in the extra songs are all-new tracks ‘Captain Chicken’ (featuring Del The Funky Homosapien), ‘Controllah’ (featuring MC Bin Laden) and ‘Crockadillaz’ (featuring De La Soul and Dawn Penn), along with a ‘2D Piano Version’ of ‘Silent Running’ (featuring Adeleye Omotayo), and a Dom Dolla remix of Tame Impala and Bootie Brown collaboration ‘New Gold’.
‘Cracker Island’ is the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Song Machine, Season One – Strange Timez‘. The virtual band, headed up by Damon Albarn, has a host of collaborators on their eighth studio album including Stevie Nicks, Bad Bunny, Beck, Thundercat, Adeleye Omotayond and more.
Listen to the expanded version of ‘Cracker Island’ below.
Reviewing ‘Cracker Island’, NME wrote: “Albarn and his team appear unburdened by living up to a concept, and instead turn in a consistently enjoyable record that shows why they remain relevant so far into their career.
“A band that was once considered mucking about on the periphery of pop are now very much defining the present and inspiring the future. You could be doing much worse for album eight, eh?”
Elsewhere, Albarn has confirmed that a feature-length Gorillaz film that was in the works at Netflix has been cancelled.
The frontman first announced the film in October 2020 before confirming the band were working with Netflix on it just over a year later.
“I’m at Netflix because we’re making a full-length Gorillaz film with Netflix,” he said at the time. “Yeah, we’re having a writing session in Malibu this afternoon. It’s really exciting to do that. It’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. It’s been through so many incarnations…this Gorillaz doing a movie. Honestly.
But due to a cut back in the streaming platform’s animation division, Albarn has now confirmed that “it will never happen.”
Albarn also revealed last week that, after Gorillaz’ divisive Glastonbury headline set in 2010, Kate Bush phoned to tell him it was “one of the best shows she’d ever seen”.
