Gorillaz is not a band in the ordinary sense. It is a virtual group, four animated characters fronting music written by Damon Albarn of Blur, with every drawing, every scowl and every album sleeve coming from artist Jamie Hewlett. The cast never changes: 2D on vocals and keyboards, Murdoc Niccals on bass, the guitarist Noodle, and the drummer Russel Hobbs. Since 2001 those four faces have carried some of the most inventive pop of the century, moving fluidly between hip-hop, dub, electronica and rock, and the posters gathered here trace their whole strange arc, one album cover at a time. Each sleeve is a self-contained world, which is exactly what makes them worth hanging.
The Kong Studios years (2001 to 2005)
It begins with Gorillaz, the 2001 self-titled debut recorded partly at Geejam Studios in Jamaica and produced with Dan the Automator. Fuelled by the single Clint Eastwood, which features Del the Funky Homosapien, it sold over seven million copies and proved a cartoon band could top real charts. Four years later came the masterpiece, Demon Days, produced with Danger Mouse in 2005. Feel Good Inc won a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, and the album moved roughly eight million copies. Both covers are icons of 2000s design, and both hang beautifully.
Plastic Beach and the iPad (2010 to 2011)
The third record, Plastic Beach, is a full concept album about ocean pollution and the debris we throw away, built around a floating island of trash. Albarn pulled in Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Bobby Womack and Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of The Clash. Right after it came The Fall, an experiment unlike anything else in the catalogue: Albarn recorded the whole thing on an iPad across 32 days of the North American tour, mostly one track per day, no overdubs. It reads as a travel diary of America in sound.
The return (2017 to 2018)
After a long pause the characters came back for Humanz in 2017, imagined as the soundtrack to a party for the end of the world. Grace Jones, Vince Staples, Pusha T, Danny Brown and Popcaan all guest across its sprawling tracklist. The follow up, The Now Now in 2018, was a deliberate reset: recorded fast in February that year with only three guests, it pushed Albarn's own voice back to the centre after critics found Humanz too crowded.
The Last Cult (2023)
The most recent chapter is Cracker Island, released in February 2023. Set in Silverlake, Los Angeles, it is a loose concept album about conspiracy theories, online echo chambers and a fictional group called the Last Cult, with Murdoc as its self-appointed leader. Guests include Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Beck and Bad Bunny. It became the band's first UK number one album since Demon Days, nearly two decades on, and its warm pink palette makes it one of the most collectable covers in the whole run.
Every poster in this collection is printed on heavyweight museum-grade matte paper with rich, faithful colour, so Hewlett's inky linework and saturated palettes stay crisp. Sizes run from compact A4 up to statement A1, so you can slot a single sleeve above a desk or anchor a whole wall. Each design ships either unframed, ready for your own frame, or framed and ready to hang straight from the box. If you are torn on size, A3 and A2 are the crowd favourites for music prints: large enough to read across a room, easy to group.
Gorillaz sleeves were built to sit together, so they make an unusually good gallery wall. Try the pastel calm of Plastic Beach beside the neon dread of Demon Days, or run all four eras in chronological order for a visual timeline of the band. Mix a couple of Gorillaz covers with other art-forward acts for a record-shop feel, keep the frames identical for cohesion, and leave a steady gap of a few centimetres between prints so each cover has room to breathe.
