Songfacts®:

• Gorillaz' ninth album, The Mountain, is part spiritual trek, part philosophical rummage through the attic of memory. It is largely concerned with loss, farewell rituals, and the curious question of what exactly happens after the lights go out. Sitting near the emotional center of that journey is "The Moon Cave," a track that treats grief like a quiet echo bouncing around somewhere underground.
• The opening lines establish the cave as a liminal space, a place of reckoning between the living and the departed:
  
  To the Moon Cave
  Where I bought my tears
  Lit the lantern on my childhood fears
  
  It's the sort of imagery Damon Albarn has always enjoyed: half dreamscape, half diary entry, recalling the ghostly atmosphere of "El Mañana" or the reflective melancholy of "On Melancholy Hill," except here the scenery feels more like a mythological waiting room. 2D isn't quite in the land of the living but hasn't fully crossed over either.
• "The Moon Cave" began years earlier as an unreleased Plastic Beach-era track titled "Float Tropics," which featured Dave Jolicoeur of De La Soul, better known to hip-hop fans as Trugoy the Dove. Jolicoeur passed away in February 2023, and Albarn had long hinted he wanted to finish the collaboration as a tribute. Reviving the recording for The Mountain transformed a forgotten session into something rather more affecting: a conversation with a voice that's no longer here.
• Throughout the third verse, Jolicoeur's archived vocals and The Roots' MC Black Thought weave around a rhythmic chant of "Float... Topic... Float... Topic," a callback to De La Soul's Buhloone Mindstate track "Float," which Jolicoeur co-wrote.
• The late Bobby Womack, who had previously collaborated with Gorillaz on three Plastic Beach-era songs - "Stylo" "Cloud Of Unknowing," and "Bobby in Phoenix" - appears here via archival vocals recorded before his death in 2014.
• Also contributing is pioneering Indo-jazz singer Asha Puthli, whose career stretches back to collaborations with avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman on the 1972 album Science Fiction. Her vocals glide between Indian classical phrasing and smoky jazz inflection, forming a bridge between the track's spiritual themes and its hip-hop backbone. Soul singer Jalen Ngonda, whose 2023 debut Come Around and Love Me revived the vintage Daptone sound, adds another layer of gospel-tinged warmth.
• The recording locations read like stops on an unusually philosophical world tour. Parts were tracked at Studio 13 in London and Devon, with additional sessions in Mumbai, Miami's Criteria Recording Studios, and most evocatively the Ghats of Varanasi; the ancient river steps along the Ganges River where Hindu cremation rituals take place.
• The song's imagery comes to life in an eight-minute animated video linking three tracks: "The Moon Cave," The Mountain," and "The Sad God." Directed by Gorillaz illustrator Jamie Hewlett, Tim McCourt, and Max Taylor, it finds the Gorillaz characters wandering through a glowing cavern where animals sing and cave paintings animate themselves, leading to an encounter with the Hindu deity Tarakeshwara, who ferries them across a lake.
• On March 7, 2026 - roughly a quarter-century after their debut - Gorillaz finally appeared on Saturday Night Live, performing "Clint Eastwood" with Del the Funky Homosapien, and "The Moon Cave" with Puthli and Black Thought during an episode hosted by Ryan Gosling.
• Conceived after both Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett experienced the deaths of close family members, The Mountain circles around the idea that the dead aren't entirely gone; they're simply waiting somewhere in the archive of memory. "The Moon Cave" embodies that notion: a place where old collaborations resurface, voices return from the past, and music - rather miraculously - keeps people in the room a little while longer.