Songfacts®:

• Here, Gorillaz lead singer 2-D (aka Damon Albarn) recounts a cult that started on Cracker Island. The creators of the cult entice followers with promises of a perfect paradise, but it's nothing of the sort. After 2-D and others get lured in, they pay with their souls, only to find the promised utopian world doesn't exist.
  
  Said Albarn to BBC Radio's Jack Saunders, "I think the Cracker Island is a sort of the idea that people have kind of some mad ideas can all kind of live together happily in their own kind of echo chamber Cracker Island."
• Thundercat joins Gorillaz on the high-energy track, adding his trademark bass guitar and answer vocals.
• Albarn and Thundercat wrote "Cracker Island" with Greg Kurstin. "It started like most things do just on GarageBand," Albarn told Jack Saunders. "I went to LA and work with Greg Kurstin, and then Thundercat came for that amazing baseline on. I wanted someone to say in this falsetto answer phrase all the way through. I always had the idea and he came up."
• American songwriter/producer Greg Kurstin has an impressive resumé that includes hits for Kelly Clarkson ("What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)"), Sia ("Cheap Thrills"), and Adele ("Hello," "Easy On Me"). This is first collaboration with Gorillaz, or for that matter on any of Damon Albarn's projects.
• Albarn and Kurstin co-produced "Cracker Island" with the animated outfit's Nigerian drummer, Remi Kabaka Jr. He first became friends with Albarn when he used to live with the singer's partner, Suzi.
• Gorillaz premiered "Cracker Island" when they kicked off their 2022 World Tour at Antel Arena, Montevideo, Uruguay on April 28, 2022.
• Cracker Island is a fictitious island not to be confused with Crocker Island on New York's Susquehanna River, or Croker Island off Australia's Northern Territory coast.
• Greg Kurstin had just been working with Thundercat and they'd become friends. The producer texted him and asked to help with this song, which he agreed to do. "It was very fun to watch him work on it and to hear him write his melody parts," Kurstin told Apple Music. "He sang a lot of what Damon sang and then added his own thing and the harmonies. It's always fun to witness him play, because he's absolutely amazing on the bass."
• "Cracker" is American vernacular for a crazy white person. "It's derogatory slang," Albarn explained during a Q+A session with comedian Alan Carr for Banquet Records (via NME). "Cracker Island is a place where all the Anglo-Saxon traits that maybe I wouldn't want to embody myself, they all hang out. Cracker Island is a place where ideas like QAnon exist. They'd only listen to Fox News on Cracker Island."
  
  Visual artist Jamie Hewlett added that Cracker Island was inspired by Los Angeles. "We had the idea for the band to become a cult, because after Trump, it felt like a lot of cults were popping up," he said. "People are desperate for misinformation because they're scared of the truth."
• Cracker Island was Gorillaz's second UK #1 album and their first since they reached the summit with Demon Days in 2005.
• Cracker Island is a loose concept album inspired by modern conspiracy culture and the way online echo chambers can start to feel like self-contained worlds. The album's narrative was originally meant to tie into a full-fledged film project.
  
  "We were working on a movie with Netflix that we pulled out of at the last minute," Hewlett told Dazed. "They move incredibly slow, so we kind of wrote our own movie, which became Cracker Island."
  
  Rather than abandoning the storyline, Gorillaz folded it into the album, allowing the plot to evolve alongside the music. The narrative ends with the characters escaping to India, an idea sparked by real life. As Hewlett explained, when the album was being finished, he was in India visiting his wife's mother and began imagining how that setting might shape the story's conclusion.