This weekend, Damon Albarn makes his long-awaited SNL debut with Gorillaz. Ryan Gosling will serve as host, and the promo came out today, with the English frontman mostly stone-faced with no lines.
Jamie Hewlett, the illustrator of Gorillaz, stood beside Albarn equally stone-faced as Gosling and Ashley Padilla cracked jokes. Albarn and Hewlett don’t break character until the end, when Padilla asks them how it feels to finally be a musical guest, and they respond by smiling goofily and wiggling their fingers. Meanwhile the Project Hail Mary star’s previous promo clip was soundtracked by Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood.”
Albarn also confirmed in an interview with The Needle Drop that he’s scoring Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a film focused on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “I think there was a foolish moment where the big corporations thought AI was going to make their life easier and more money,” Albarn said. “And well, that is not the case. I don’t think it’s possible for AI to make soulful music.”
He added:
I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Music and art should not be easy. Once it becomes easy, it’s meaningless. In a way, it’s the things you don’t see or hear that make it art. It’s a weird intuition that the listener has that picks up on the journey that the artist has been through to make that particular thing with the tone of the voice, etc. You can’t replace that.
Watch the SNL promo clips below along with the interview with The Needle Drop.
