Co-founder Jamie Hewlett confirmed the news to DIY, saying the initial phases of the project are in the works. “I’m working on it at the moment, and it’s going very well,” said Hewlett. “I’m very excited. I don’t want to say too much about it, but I’m at that phase of experimentation.” Hewlett’s comments confirm those that Damon Albarn, the group’s other founding member (and Blur frontman), made earlier this year.
Hewlett didn’t reveal much else about the new music, but the musician (and artist of the Gorillaz animated characters) did explain to DIY how he likes to remain solitary during his creative process. “What I try not to do when I’m working in this creative period, the cooking of the mess, is go to other peoples’ exhibitions and look at other peoples’ work. I close my eyes, and don’t want to know what anyone else is doing. Doing that has kind of ruined the creative process for me in the past, and I don’t want to let that happen again.”
Their last studio record, The Fall, which was recorded on Albarn’s iPod during their 2010 Plastic Beach tour, had an initial fan club-only vinyl release in 2010, before its wide release the following April. “I literally made it on the road in America over a month,” he told Perth Now newspaper in Australia (via the BBC). “I didn’t write it before, I didn’t prepare it. I just did it day by day as a kind of diary of my experience in America.”
It sounds like the upcoming record will be put together by means of a more traditional writing and recording process. And, according to Albarn, it will likely be upbeat, as well. The british pop/rock icon told Swide Magazine earlier this year that the next Gorillaz release will be a “happy, positive and funny one!”
