Your favorite animated band is still hitting its stride. As the group’s immersive exhibition hits New York, we’re saying cheers to 25 years with a look back on animator Jamie Hewlett’s artistic evolution.
‘House of Kong’: An Illustrated History of Gorillaz
Your favorite animated band is still hitting its stride. As the group’s immersive exhibition hits New York, we’re saying cheers to 25 years with a look back on animator Jamie Hewlett’s artistic evolution.
“If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Perhaps the saying ran through the minds of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett in their shared London flat back in the ’90s. Blur frontman Albarn and Hewlett, the Tank Girl comic illustrator, had become bored with the era’s celebrity artifice, and sought to double down with a group — half art, half music — the industry had yet to witness. In came Gorillaz, the world’s first virtual band.
25 years later, the Gorillaz universe keeps getting richer. On the occasion of their now ninth studio album, The Mountain, an immersive exhibition dedicated to the band’s misadventures has landed in New York City. House of Kong has settled into Brooklyn’s Agger Fish Building quite nicely, with a month-long run culminating in its Madison Square Garden show on September 29.
Set inside Kong Studios — Gorillaz’ HQ on a sleepy Essex hilltop — the hour-long experience tours the history of artwork, music, artifacts, and mythology behind bassist Murdoc Niccals, singer 2D, drummer Russel Hobbs, and guitarist Noodle. We don’t want to give too much away (though if you’re looking for Lucian Freud’s Francis Bacon painting someone stole in 1988, 2D is a prime culprit). This is all to say, the lore runs deep.
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Gorillaz has left a pretty serious footprint on culture, netting countless chart-toppers, hundreds of shows, awards, and a Guinness World Record. But music is only half the story. Beyond a starry coterie of collaborators and features, or a knack for genre-bending, Gorillaz has gone on to inspire a new generation of animators chasing that punkish rush that first put them on the map and the appetite for invention that kept them there.
House of Kong is the first IRL experience dedicated to the band’s full visual legacy, and includes entire galleries of early concepts, scrapped characters, and unreleased videos through the years. The exhibition is less of a retrospective than “an installation that takes a glance backwards in order to identify the path ahead,” as creative director Stephen Gallagher, and both co-founders, made clear earlier this year. Even so, consider this our excuse to revisit the good ole (demon) days with an illustrated history of the Gorillaz’ many eras.
Phase One: Celebrity Take Down (1998-2002)
The OG Gorillaz character designs, off the bat, claimed roots in counterculture comics tradition. Thick lines, geometric shapes, exaggerated poses, rendered in bold, flat colors made for the cool, scrappy-and-sleek look that defined Gen 1. Hewlett, semi-fresh off his Tank Girl tenure, brought a similar soft rebellious charm to this new crew. The members seemed to represent their own rockstar archetypes. But the Gorillaz story, as we would soon see, was so much more.
Highlights from this era: “Clint Eastwood,” going back to the basics, and Murdoc rejecting a 2001 Mercury Prize nomination, middle finger high, against the wishes of their then-label.
Phase Two: Slowboat to Hades (2004-2008)
The Demon Days era gave way to muted palettes and heavier textures, giving the characters more angular designs. The album itself bore a darker concept, circling themes of war and corruption, and the visuals tended to its sound: a denser, more hip-hop-driven project shaped by Danger Mouse, backed by the likes of MF DOOM, De La Soul, Shaun Ryder, and Dennis Hopper. The Gorillaz, unlike most animations, had already grown up.
Highlights from this era: Jamie Hewlett’s limited-edition Stained Glass Windows prints featuring the members across five chapel-like panels, published by Hewlett and Banksy’s now-defunct Pictures on Walls.
Phase Three: Escape to Plastic Beach (2008-2013)
The band ups the gloss for its third studio album, with a brighter, more summery palette to fit the psychedelic sound. In the project’s storyline, the band flees England for Plastic Beach, a remote island off the coast of Southern Chile to establish a new HQ. The island itself is made up of trash floating in the Pacific, congealed into one Pacific landmass. The residence up top, according to the fictional lore, was designed by M.C. Escher.
Band portraits, here, are swapped for landscape pieces, gesturing towards the political concerns in the animated world, alongside Albarn and bassist Paul Simonon’s real-life involvement with Greenpeace in 2011. While a push towards CGI-like visuals took the band into new territory, it didn’t fare well with all fans. For the first time, the group’s fictional world started to feel too real, though it tested the waters for future 3D styles in later phases.
Highlights from this era: A four-meter tall Plastic Beach model and the storyboard-turned-visualizer for an unrealized “Rhinestone Eyes” music video.
Phase Four: We Are Still Humanz (2014-2018)
After a seven-year hiatus, Humanz saw a return to Gorillaz’ 2D roots, but with a noticeably polished upgrade. Flatter character designs sit against richly detailed 3D backgrounds, while sharper lines and more refined proportions give the band a slicker, more mature look. Partly developed to better accommodate a tricky hologram set-up during their live shows, the style also showed that Gorillaz was always about reinventing itself, and not just running back its greatest hits, aesthetically speaking.
Highlights from this era: The “Saturnz Barz (Spirit House)” music video, which also toured as a touring immersive experience, and the band’s first live-streamed Q&A on YouTube — a true feat in Gorillaz tech.
Phase Five: No More Unicorns Anymore (2018-2019)
With its more melancholic, stripped-back sound, The Now Now feels like a comedown from Humanz, with visuals following suit. With the rest of the band out of the picture, this project puts 2D, now a lone frontman, center stage. Album artwork features clean, few-toned graphic compositions with nods to ’80s retro-pop comic callbacks, making for one of the most distinct visual languages out of all the bodies of work.
Highlights from this era: “Tranz” their first proper on-stage “live” performance, complete with trippy visuals by Hewlett and Nicos Livesey above a synth-rock number.
Phase Six: Wish You Wear Ear (2019-2021)
Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, released during COVID, had fans hyped. A culmination of the Song Machine project, an episodic web series of videos and singles, each were animated around the song’s featurees. From Slowthai, Elton John, and Robert Smith to Beck, St. Vincent, and ScHoolboy Q, the album’s sound reflected that of its Rolodex of guests and influences. The art, of course, was fittingly playful, hovering betweenp several aesthetics and illustrative designs.
Highlights from this era: Can we say the whole series?
Phase Seven: The Static Channel (2022-2024)
Cracker Island takes place in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, after a sinkhole ousts the band from Kong once again. The concept, in part, reflected the real-life axing of Gorillaz’ Netflix feature, which would eventually turn into this album. Unpacking the cultish air around internet echo chambers and life online, the foursome is rendered in a more pristine 3D style, true to the album’s exploration of the contemporary soullessness and corporate-controlled culture that spurred the group’s formation in the first place. This go-around at 3D felt more true to Gorillaz’ progression and themes thus far, balancing comic stylization and hyperreal figuration.
Highlights from this era: The “Cracker Island” music video, where 2D and Russel appear near-zombified (à la “Clint Eastwood”) beside Thundercat. The Gorillaz Art Book, the band’s first visual collaboration, was also released during this period. Alongside archival artwork from Hewlett, the 288-pager features more than several re-styled versions of Murdoc, 2D, Noodle, and Russel by 40 artists and musicians.
Phase Eight: The Mountain (2025–)
This brings us to The Mountain, arguably Gorillaz’ most visually intricate endeavor yet. With clear cues from India throughout, the album, released in February 2026, thematically dials in on death, grief, and the afterlife, inspired by profound personal loss experienced by both Albarn and Hewlett during its production. The two considered pain through a more “optimistic” attitude that Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs held around death. Unused vocals from former Gorillaz collaborators who have since passed were also repurposed, with Dennis Hopper, Mark E. Smith, and Bobby Womack making appearances on the project.
The artwork is rich with visual references to Jaipur, known as the “Pink City,” where Hewlett had an unexpected two-month stay caring for his mother-in-law. Hand-drawn, anatomically detailed characters sit above ornate settings with deeper shading and shadows throughout. Spiritual discovery runs through the illustrations, too, with earthy palettes abound and warm, albeit curious, expressions fashioned on band members in key album imagery.
Highlights from this era: “The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God” short film, created with The Line Studio, is entirely hand-drawn and made to emulate old-school animation techniques from the ’60s and ’70s.
In an interview last year, Albarn, about the artistic and sonic cohesion, called The Mountain “the next record after Plastic Beach” alluding his and Hewlett’s separation through the 2010’s. What we’re gathering is that Gorillaz is hitting their stride once again. Even 25 years on, they’ve yet again carved another world to disappear into. And according to the co-founders, they’re already onto the next.
Gorillaz House of Kong is now on view in New York until September 28. Head to the exhibition’s website to secure your tickets today.