Songfacts®:

• Gorillaz fans have learned to expect the unexpected, and that's just what they got with "The Mountain," the first song and title track to their ninth album, released in 2026. It's an instrumental piece of Indian music until about the 4-minute mark, when we hear the actor Dennis Hopper speaking.
  
  And yes, Dennis Hopper died in 2010, so this was beyond the grave. Hopper's vocals came from the sessions when he recorded narration for the 2005 Gorillaz track "Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head."
• The album The Mountain has a theme of death - how to deal with it and what comes after. For that reason, Gorillaz decided to include posthumous contributions from their earlier collaborators. Along with Dennis Hopper, there are appearances by Bobby Womack (d. 2014) and Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul (d. 2023).
  
  "I just thought, if we're going to talk about the subject of death, I need some people who are dead to help me talk about it," Gorillaz musical leader Damon Albarn told Rolling Stone. "They know more about it than me."
• The Indian music on this song came out of some trips to India that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett (who handles visual for Gorillaz) took together after their fathers died 10 days apart in 2024. The trip was a way for them to process their grief but seeing how death is handled in Indian culture, where it's considered a transition of the soul into a new form. Albarn and Hewlett found the trip comforting and enlightening. They decided to make it the framework of their album The Mountain, with the title track serving as the introduction.
• One of the musician on this track is Anoushka Shankar, who played sitar. She's the daughter of Ravi Shankar, who taught the instrument to George Harrison (who played it on the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"). Anoushka Shankar played on eight track on the album.