Last year, Damon Albarn oversaw his longtime project Gorillaz release their seventh album, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez. This year, Albarn released his second solo album, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows. To celebrate its release, Albarn stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to perform “Darkness To Light,” one of the standout tracks from the album. He delivered a gloomy performance with a black and white video that featured a live band behind him.
Albarn previously spoke about the new album in an interview back in June. “I organized musicians, string players, three bass trombones, some percussion, and keyboards into an interesting arrangement,” he said. “I took some of these real-time, extreme elemental experiences [of Iceland] and then tried to develop more formal pop songs with that as my source. I wanted to see where that would take me. Sometimes it took me down to Uruguay and Montevideo. Other times I went to Iran, Iceland, or Devon. With travel being curtailed, it was kind of nice to be able to make a record that put me strangely in those places for a moment or two.”
You can watch Albarn perform “Darkness To Light” in the video above.
The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is out now via Transgressive Records. Get it here.
Gorillaz is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.