Moving out of the city and into the countryside is a theme that Damon Albarn explores a lot, at least that I know of from listening to the stuff he does with Blur. The earliest I can think of is on ‘Chemical World’ from Modern Life Is Rubbish in ’93. There’s a b-side of the band’s called ‘Get Out of Cities’, which is pretty self-explanatory. And in 2003, he sings about the country having a hold of his soul and having no town to hide in in ‘Good Song’. I guess there’s something about the natural landscape that interests him. And I’m also gonna guess that it was on his mind again when he was casting off his Blur shackles for a while at the start of the century, started Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, and wrote a song called ‘Slow Country’ that was included on that project’s debut album.

I don’t think it’d be a wrong thing to say Gorillaz gave Albarn a sense of freedom that he probably wasn’t able to fulfil, being in a band with three other guys for a good part of a decade up to the point of Gorillaz’s inception. And with this reinvigoration, he laid out bare his interest in dub and hip-hop that no Blur fan would have guessed existed. ‘Slow Country’ is a track indebted to the former, led by a thick bass line and formed by a generally spaced-out soundscape, reinforced by the windy sound effect sampled from ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials. A lot of the lyrics on the Gorillaz debut, I feel, were mostly written around the music, written more for the sake of feel rather than a narrative standpoint or having a sense of direction. Albarn also found that he could sing in any way he wanted, switching up the timbre of his vocals plenty of times throughout. It’s no different on ‘Slow Country’. Sometimes I think any lyrics site that has the words to the track on their pages don’t have the correct ones, just because of the loose and playful way he enunciates the words.

From what I’ve come to understand after hearing it for so many years is that ‘Slow Country’ may be about Albarn getting out of the city, no matter how attractive it might be with all those vices and all, and focusing on upping his funds and generally getting his life sorted out. It’s quite serious stuff. But with this new Gorillaz project, he could disguise it in a way that made it off-kilter and quirky. He didn’t have to deliver his words as earnestly and could instead joke around and have fun a little. Instead of electric guitars, there’ll be a piano playing a childlike melody. Musical breaks with drifting synthesizers that make you feel like you’re floating in space. And of course those unforgettable “noot noot” vocalisations that remarkably sound very similar to those of everybody’s favourite animated penguin.