Gorillaz took a turn for the conceptual for their third full length with an album focused on environmentalist themes, presenting the titular Plastic Beach as a "secret floating island deep in the South Pacific, made up of the detritus, debris, and washed-up remnants of humanity" — inspired by marine pollution such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Somehow it ends up infinitely more whimsical and upbeat than you'd expect given the source material of inspiration. Musically, the album adopts a primarily electronic, synth-pop sound, with additional influences including hip-hop, funk and orchestral.
Damon Albarn got the idea for the album while on a beach next to his house: "I was just looking for all the plastic within the sand". The first time Albarn went to Mali, he was taken to a landfill where he observed how differently rubbish was dealt with compared to England; he had previously visited a landfill outside London to record the sound of seagulls for the album. In Mali, the landfill had "more snakes... like adders, grass snakes, slow worms, toads, frogs, newts, all kinds of rodents, all kinds of squirrels, a massive number of squirrels, foxes, and obviously, seagulls. This is part of the new ecology. And for the first time I saw the world in a new way. I've always felt, I'm trying to get across on this new record, the idea that plastic, we see it as being against nature but it's come out of nature. We didn't create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt... but trying to get that into pop music is a challenge, anyway. But important."
Albarn said in September 2008 that he wanted "to work with an incredibly eclectic, surprising cast of people". And boy did he ever make good on that. The album features Snoop Dogg, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Kano, Bashy, Bobby Womack, Mos Def, Gruff Rhys, De La Soul, Little Dragon, Mark E. Smith, Lou Reed, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, sinfonia Viva and the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music.
In October 2020, Albarn stated that he had "loads and loads of songs" for a direct sequel to Plastic Beach, citing "the need to keep reminding people that we need to change our habits" as his main reason for revisiting the album's themes. He added, "I'd like to just have an album called Clean Beach, but at the moment it's still Plastic Beach." Here's to hoping we can clean up our act enough for the sequel.
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