Gorillaz Drop A New Single 'Hallelujah Money'

Just this Thursday the British Pop-Punk band Gorillaz just released a new single and music video for the first time in almost five years since their single DoYaThing featuring James Murphy and Andre 3000, and almost six years since their album The Fall. Their new single is Hallelujah Money, a collaboration between Gorillaz and British songwriter and poet Benjamin Clementine. Gorillaz has released that this is to be one of many songs to be released before the unveiling of a new album according to the YouTube channel ‘All Eyes on Gorillaz’.

The song is definitely a new kind of style that Damon Albarn is trying to produce. This isn’t knew considering that each album he releases has a different kind of style and feeling to it. Plastic Beach for example was much more electronic and synthetic. This new single has a kind of synthetic sound, but at the same there is a large focus on vocals. Benjamin Clementine sings most of the lyrics with long deep notes that echo in the track, and supporting him is a choir of people which seems to echo a church choir. I begin to wonder if this next album will focus more on vocals and lyrics compared to other albums, but for now we can only speculate.

Gorillaz’s songs have always been political or speaking towards issues. Dirty Harry is about the Iraq war, Don’t Get Lost in Heaven is about gang violence, Kids with Guns is about gun violence, and Green World is about landfills and environmental crisis. For Hallelujah Money, it is about the correlation between wealth and power in our society. The purpose of the song is to highlight how the President of the United States was able to achieve office because of his economic power, and buy his way into position. Benjamin Clementine and Damon Albarn released the song the day before Trump’s inauguration as a “soulful meditation on business power, and humanity” according to Rolling Stone.

The most jarring part of the song is at the end. The end is comprised of high long vocals of Clementine singing “Hallelujah money” with choirs in the background, and bells ringing. After a few seconds everything fades out as electric sounds start to overwhelmingly grow, and Clementine shouts “Hallelujah money” in a jarring way, that is immediately followed by Spongebob-Squarepants screaming and crying. I think that the end is supposed to be that the speech has ended and the message has been proclaimed, and now upon realization of what is happening it is time to panic.

To take away from the song, I feel like What Damon and Benjamin are trying to say is that we have to come together and move forward. They are calling for us to resist this new wave of corruption and speak out about it directly as it happens. Essentially, this new song is Benjamin and Damon collectively spitting on Donald Trump's name and speaking out against corporate greed and the power it has collected.

Here's the article in Rolling Stone