Gorillaz have spent two decades dismantling genre barriers, but “Damascus” feels like the moment where every experiment finally clicks into place.
Featuring Syrian electro-dabke legend Omar Souleyman and Brooklyn’s Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), this track arrives as the fourth single from their ninth album The Mountain, and it’s the kind of controlled chaos that only Damon Albarn’s cartoon collective could pull off.
What makes “Damascus” land so hard is how effortlessly it marries three distinct musical worlds.
Souleyman’s serpentine synthesizers, drawn from northeast Syrian wedding music traditions, coil around Yasiin Bey’s fleet-footed flow while producers James Ford, Samuel Egglenton, and Remi Kabaka Jr. anchor everything with a beat that bangs harder than it has any right to.
This isn’t fusion for fusion’s sake. The song moves with purpose, each element given space to breathe before locking into a groove that feels both ancient and hypermodern.
The track’s backstory adds another layer. The song originates from a Plastic Beach-era demo titled “Fresh Arrivals,” recorded with Souleyman and Yasiin Bey around 2008-2009 but never released.
Damon Albarn confirmed in a 2023 interview with Zane Lowe that this was the third Yasiin Bey collaboration from those sessions.
Over 15 years later, Albarn revisited the material, recording fresh versions across Damascus, London, Devon, Mumbai, and New York for The Mountain.
Souleyman, who fled Syria’s civil war and spent years in Turkey where he established a free bakery in Akçakale distributing thousands of loaves daily to refugees and poor families, brings lived experience to lyrics that navigate between homeland and exile, between Point Nemo (Earth’s most isolated spot) and Damascus (one of civilisation’s oldest cities).
The Sound: When Wedding Music Meets The Future
Omar Souleyman built his reputation transforming traditional dabke into something feral and electric. His contribution here is pure controlled chaos.
Those trademark ululating keyboards that made him a festival fixture sound right at home next to Gorillaz’s more experimental impulses.
The production team wisely resists the urge to over-polish. You can hear the grit, the cassette-tape authenticity that made Souleyman’s early Sublime Frequencies releases so addictive.
Yasiin Bey slides into the pocket with that conversational flow he perfected on tracks like “Ms. Fat Booty” and “Umi Says.”
His verses crackle with imagery: “Navigate the waves in the dark no map / Stars in the heavens and a breeze on my back.”
There’s a nautical theme running throughout, ships moving from Damascus to Point Nemo, “new arrivals” seeking “fresh survival.”
Bey code-switches between celebration and commentary, his ad-libs (“Fresh!”) punctuating Souleyman’s Arabic verses like call-and-response at its finest.
The beat itself deserves its own paragraph. Hand percussion from Viraj Acharya adds organic texture while electronic drums maintain that relentless forward momentum.
When the bass drops, it hits with the force of a sound system at a Beirut nightclub. This is dance music, sure, but it’s dance music that makes you think.
Lyrics That Navigate Between Worlds
“Damascus” operates on multiple frequencies. Surface level, it’s a banger about freshness and arrival, the kind of track that sounds massive at festivals.
Dig deeper and you find layers of meaning about displacement, cultural identity, and resisting homogenization.
The repeated refrain “Turkish coffee, Starbucks, get off me“ cuts straight to the bone. It’s a rejection of corporate blandness, a defense of authenticity in an era where every city starts to look the same.
When Bey raps “new brand news and an old school voice,” he’s not just flexing. He’s making a statement about tradition meeting innovation on equal terms.
Souleyman’s Arabic verses add emotional weight. Lines translated as “every day my eye is on you / tomorrow where am I and where are you” speak to separation and longing.
Combined with Bey’s bars about navigation and knowing “where I’m headed and I be where I’m at,” the song becomes a meditation on finding your bearings when the world keeps shifting.
The Point Nemo reference is especially clever. Named after the Jules Verne character, it’s the oceanic point farthest from any landmass, the loneliest spot on Earth.
Pairing it with Damascus creates this poetic tension between isolation and connection, between the ancient city and the void.
The fantasy might be real, as the lyrics suggest, but the song’s imagery of ships and navigation speaks to themes of displacement and searching for home, particularly resonant given the Syrian refugee crisis that forced millions, including Souleyman, to flee their homeland.
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Production That Serves The Vision
James Ford, who’s worked with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode, brings his ear for space and dynamics. The mix allows each element room to breathe. Souleyman’s vocals sit right up front, untamed and urgent, while the synths bubble underneath.
Ford and his co-producers understand that sometimes less is more. They let the groove ride without cluttering it with unnecessary embellishments.
The choice to keep this recording relatively raw works in its favour. While modern pop production often sandpapers away any rough edges, “Damascus” retains that live energy, that sense of musicians in a room feeding off each other.
You can hear fingers on keys, breath on microphones. It feels human, which matters when you’re making music about displacement and resilience.
Where This Fits In Gorillaz Canon
For longtime fans, “Damascus” will sound like classic Gorillaz, the kind of genre-agnostic worldbuilding that made Demon Days essential.
But it also signals where the band is headed. The Mountain, their first release on independent label KONG, represents artistic freedom from major label expectations. They’re chasing sounds that matter rather than chasing charts.
This track works perfectly alongside earlier singles “The God of Lying” (with IDLES) and “The Manifesto” (with Trueno and the late Proof).
Each collaboration brings different energy, but they share a commitment to pushing boundaries while keeping one foot planted in tradition.
“Damascus” slots into this narrative seamlessly. It’s Gorillaz at their most ambitious, most political, most alive.
The use of material from the Plastic Beach era (the intro “Sunday Monday” and the core “Fresh Arrivals” demo) adds metatextual weight.
These songs existed in demo form for over a decade before finding their final shape. The new recordings, captured across five cities including Damascus in 2025, give the material fresh context while honoring its origins.
The Verdict
“Damascus” succeeds because it refuses to play it safe. Lesser bands would have smoothed out the edges, made it more palatable for streaming playlists.
Instead, Gorillaz lean into the weirdness, trusting their audience to meet them where they are. The result is a song that sounds like nothing else in their catalog while still feeling distinctly them.
Omar Souleyman’s presence elevates this beyond typical Western pop appropriation of world music. He’s not decoration.
He’s a co-author, his musical DNA woven into every bar. The Syrian artist, who previously collaborated with Four Tet on the acclaimed Wenu Wenu album, brings the same authenticity here.
Yasiin Bey matches his energy with bars that show why he remains one of hip-hop’s most thoughtful voices. And the production team deserves credit for knowing when to step back and let the artists shine.
This is Gorillaz doing what they do best: building bridges between worlds that aren’t supposed to touch. Syrian dabke and Brooklyn hip-hop shouldn’t work together on paper.
But “Damascus” proves that when you approach collaboration with respect and genuine curiosity, magic happens. The beat is relentless, the flow infectious, and the cultural statement impossible to ignore.
For a band nine albums deep, still finding new ways to surprise listeners, “Damascus” stands as proof that Gorillaz aren’t coasting on legacy. They’re building it in real time, one improbable collaboration at a time.