Damon Albarn has always been a hard guy to pin down. From Blur’s Britpop anthems to Gorillaz’s genre-melting collabs, he’s never been content to sit still. His latest solo album, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, feels like a quiet rebellion against everything loud and crowded—a deep, cold breath taken on the edge of the world.
And he wasn’t kidding when he said it’s influenced by Iceland. The whole thing started as a “play the landscape” project, holed up in a studio with a view of the country’s bleak, shifting beauty. “It’s the youngest island on Earth,” Albarn tells me, like he’s describing a particularly moody teenager. “Volcanoes, geothermal hot springs… it’s like the earth is just trying to break itself open.”
He doesn’t just mean that metaphorically. There’s a place not far from Reykjavik where hot water just shoots out of the ground, and Albarn’s fascinated by the idea that humans are just trying to coexist with it. “It’s like having your house built on a time bomb,” he laughs. “You turn on the tap, and that hot water’s coming straight from the Earth. But it makes you think about how delicate it all is—how easily it could just… break.”
The record sounds like that, too—big, empty spaces full of uneasy beauty. It’s a stark contrast to his previous solo record, Everyday Robots, which was about being human in a digital world. This one is nature against itself, with Albarn caught in the middle, whispering about loneliness and decay. “Am I in prison?” he sings on one track, but it’s more existential than literal. He’s stuck in his own head, looking out at a world that feels just as trapped.
And then there’s Gorillaz, the project that refuses to die no matter how many times he tries to leave it behind. “I thought it would be a one-off,” Albarn admits. “But it just keeps coming back to haunt me—in a good way. I think it’s because it’s not just mine. It belongs to everyone who’s ever worked on it, all the voices and faces that have become part of it.”
He’s been recording with Bad Bunny in Jamaica, soaking in the stormy vibes with the studio doors wide open so the rain and wind could seep into the track. “It’s got this weird, humid atmosphere,” he says, like he’s planning to bottle that feeling and take it on tour.
Even as he chases that next project, Albarn seems almost allergic to nostalgia. “You’ve got to move with the times, man,” he shrugs, talking about how Gorillaz might as well live on TikTok now. He’s not wrong—attention spans are measured in seconds, and Albarn’s already thinking about what happens when the next platform inevitably makes the current one feel prehistoric.
But no matter how many sonic detours he takes, Albarn’s heart is still in the idea of place—how music feels different depending on where you make it. Iceland is his new obsession, but it’s just one stop on a longer journey to catch every strange echo that hits his ear. “You can’t explain it,” he says. “It just gets in your bones.”
It’s hard not to believe him when you hear The Nearer the Fountain—it’s the sound of someone wrestling with his own restlessness, always searching for a way to make peace with the chaos. Whether that’s on a volcanic island or in a cartoon band doesn’t seem to matter, as long as the song keeps playing.
And here's an earlier interview with Damon and Kyle:
Speaking of Blur, here is a 2018 interview with Graham Coxon:
