Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez

By the time Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez arrived on 23 October 2020, Gorillaz had already spent much of the year turning release schedules into something looser, stranger and more alive. Framed as the culmination of the band’s episodic Song Machine project, the album gathers together a run of web-born singles and collaborations into a record that feels less like a conventional studio statement than a transmission picked up mid-flight. It is fragmented by design, but rarely unfocused.

That has always been one of Gorillaz’s sly strengths. Damon Albarn and company have long treated pop music as a passport rather than a destination, and here that instinct is sharpened by the album’s guest list, which is as crowded as it is carefully used. Slowthai, Slaves, Fatoumata Diawara, Peter Hook, Georgia, Octavian, ScHoolboy Q, Robert Smith, Elton John, 6lack, Beck, Leee John, St. Vincent and Kano all pass through its world, among others, yet Strange Timez rarely feels like a playlist held together by branding. Instead, it plays like a collage with a pulse.

Seven of the album’s eleven tracks arrived as Song Machine episodes before release, which might have left the full record feeling over-familiar or over-explained. Instead, the opposite happens. Heard together, the songs reveal a broader shape: alternative rock rubbing against hip hop, electronic music drifting into punk, pop, soul, R&B, bossa nova, acid house and post-rave melancholy. It is an album that thrives on movement. One moment, Gorillaz are scraping at something wiry and restless; the next, they are leaning into glossier textures or slowing the tempo long enough for the emotional weather to shift.

That restless quality suits the project’s origins. Conceived in a year of disruption, pauses and recalibration, Strange Timez carries the energy of adaptation. Even the album’s structure reflects that. It emerged from a web series, endured delays during the first spike of the COVID-19 pandemic, and ultimately landed not as a neat, sealed product but as a record shaped by uncertainty. That could have made it feel provisional. Instead, it gives the album its charge. Gorillaz sound energised by the chaos rather than defeated by it.

What makes the album work is not simply its stylistic breadth, but the ease with which it moves through those styles. Albarn has always been good at letting collaborators alter the temperature of a track without surrendering the identity of the band, and Strange Timez offers that in abundance. The guests do not just decorate the songs, they redirect them. Yet the album still feels recognisably Gorillaz: tongue-in-cheek, elastic, slightly haunted, and always just a little mischievous.

Critics praised its diversity and high-profile cast, and rightly so, but the real pleasure of Song Machine, Season One lies in how fluidly it holds everything together. This is not a record interested in purity. It is interested in possibility. In that sense, it captures the core appeal of Gorillaz better than many more traditional albums ever could. It is messy in the way a city is messy, full of collisions, detours and overheard brilliance.

Without a live tour, the era instead closed with Song Machine Live From Kong, a fitting substitute for a project that already felt built for reinvention. But even on record, Strange Timez succeeds because it never sounds pinned down. It is playful, porous and alert to surprise, a reminder that Gorillaz remain most compelling when they treat the studio less as a workplace than a revolving door.