Man, 2010. What a time to be alive, eh? Although I was alive in 2000, 2010 was the first proper year where I was aware that a change in the decades was happening. I thought it was something of a huge occasion. We were all quite deep into the 21st century. After all the shit that went down in the 2000s, 14-year-old me at least was feeling optimistic about the world for the times that were to come. Looking back on it in 2023, fair to say the decade had its highs and lows. One of them being the return of Gorillaz in 2010, with the release of Plastic Beach, five years on from Demon Days. Just when they needed them most, they returned.

That album’s been out for 13 years this month. While that does feel like ages ago, I do have the very clear memory of downloading it when it leaked online a few days before official release and listening to the whole thing in full. There were a lot of music downloading websites online in those days that wouldn’t survive a week in these times. If only I were on the home computer, I’d be able to tell you the exact date I did. Monitor’s busted though. Power on button just won’t click when you press it. One thing’s for sure was that the album was a hit with me from that day. Each song just seemed to be one banger after the next. An emotional rollercoaster with a ton of variety in each track. No track on there was bad. Though now there may be some established tracks that have been labelled as the ‘not so good’ ones – looking at ‘Glitter Freeze’ and unfortunately ‘Sweepstakes’ (which I also got tired of after a while, but was probably one of my favorites on there for a looong time – you can’t deny they’re at the very least interesting. Demon Days is widely regarded to be the classic. It will always be Plastic Beach for me.

And so, after this almost hour-long experience filled to the brim with guest vocalists and instrumental twists and turns, the one and only Damon Albarn (or 2D if you really want to get into it) takes the lead to close it all out with ‘Pirate Jet’, a track that I could only describe as this groovy pub-like singalong. The lyrics consist of only one verse that’s sung twice, kind of making a sarcastic joking point on how everything’s great while humanity is wasting water and using all these excessive amounts of plastic for no good reason. The album had a bit of an environmental theme going on throughout, don’t know if you knew. A vocoder-effected vocal sings the title phrase from the very start of the song too, setting the swinging rhythm that sets the bed for frizzy synthesizer chords, soulful backing ‘ooh’ harmonies and these little tinkling bells that are actually the last instruments you hear on the record as all of the others slowly fade out. Definitely has an ‘ending credits song’ feel to it. I couldn’t picture a greater note for the album to go out on.