Gorillaz Still Weird

Gorillaz came back in 2017 with Humanz, and I was probably too old to be this invested in a band that technically doesn’t exist. But the album had teeth—restless, overstuffed, guest spot after guest spot, like they were proving something to someone. They were touring again, and Cologne got the June gig at the Palladium.

Deutsche Telekom streamed the whole thing in 360 degrees, which sounds like exactly the kind of marketing nonsense that would tank a band, but something about it worked. Gorillaz had always lived in that space between animation and reality, where cartoon logic and actual live performance blurred into the same thing. A 360-degree stream wasn’t gimmicky for them—it was just another honest expression of the fundamental strangeness that made them interesting in the first place.

I don’t remember if I watched it live or if someone told me about it later. The memory is fuzzy in the way that unimportant things are, even when they matter to you. What stayed was simpler: they were still here, still making it weird, still refusing to be a normal band. That was enough.