Demon Days wasn’t supposed to happen. When Gorillaz’ self-titled dropped in 2001, it was easy to imagine as a one-off: Famed Britpop frontman Damon Albarn bids farewell to the decade of his stardom by disappearing into a side project represented by cartoon characters dreamt up by Tank Girl artist Jamie Hewlett. Even after the success of Gorillaz, that sounded like the sort of story destined to be an oddity, a fun footnote in a musician’s career. But when Demon Days arrived — 20 years ago this Sunday in Japan, a couple weeks later in the UK and US — it didn’t just establish Gorillaz as an ongoing prospect. It laid groundwork for the argument that Albarn’s seeming lark could become as important, or even more so, than the generation-defining work he’d already made with Blur.
