Damon Albarn’s double surprise
Damon Alban's comeback after his first solo album Everyday Robots in 2014, will be massive, because not only he is going to release an album for his virtual band, Gorillaz, but he also announced the upcoming eighth studio album of Blur.
Blur's new album is titled The Magic Whip and it'll be their first new album in over a dozen years, when they had released Think Tank. What's more, this will be their first with guitarist Graham Coxon since 13 in 1999. The Magic Whip will be released n April 28th, 2015. The band also uploaded the video for The Magic Whip's first single, "Go Out" on YouTube on February 19, 2015.
In May 2013 the group was about to play at Japan's Tokyo Rocks Music festival, when the entire festival was cancelled for unknown reasons, leaving the band stranded in Hong Kong for an extra five days. So the album was recorded at Hong Kong's Avon Studios over the course of those five days.
"We didn't have much [equipment]; it was like back when we first started recording stuff," Albarn said. Albarn had also stated in interviews that he wasn’t sure whether the resulting music would ever be released, "Just because you record 15 ideas doesn't mean that you've got an album," he said. In another interview he stated, "There are about 15 songs we recorded in Hong Kong. The annoying thing is, if I'd been able to write the lyrics there and then about being there, we'd have finished the record. But sometimes, if you can't do it all at once, it dissipates really and I don't know what I'd sing about now with that record. There's some great tunes on there, but it may just be one of those records that never comes out."
In November 2014 Coxon received Albarn's approval to work further on the recordings with producer Stephen Street, who had previously worked with Blur on 1993's Modern Life Is Rubbish, 1994's Parklife and the band's 1997 self-titled LP, while Albarn was touring Everyday Robots. Coming back from his tour of Australia in December, Albarn stopped in Hong Kong for one more time for lyrical inspiration. Vocals were completed towards the end of January 2015 and the album's mastering was finished on 18th February 2015.
The band mentioned, that the fact that the whole project was kept secret allowed them to work without the pressure, which would naturally come after the news of a new Blur album. "It was really accidental. It was completely natural and spontaneous. I was just singing lyrically what was coming in my head." Albarn noted. He also mentioned that he considers The Magic Whip as an urban record. "There’s something about the studio we recorded it in, it was really different," Albarn added. "I've recorded in a lot of places around the world and every place has its own spirit, so it was really interesting to make that decision it was going to be about Hong Kong. There’s points on the record where I think it really sounds like the stuff that David Bowie did in Berlin. There’s nothing pastoral about it. It's very much an urban record."
So enough with Blur, let's see what Albarn is up to with his other projects: 
On 19 October 2014, at his interview with The Sydney Morning Heral he revealed that his next material could come from Gorillaz. If that project turns out to be a full LP, Gorillaz' fifth studio album will propably be available in 2016. This news are extremely surprising, if one considers that in April 2012 Albarn told the Guardian that he and Hewlett had fallen out and that future Gorillaz projects were "unlikely". However, last year Hewlett said he expected more to come from Gorillaz. "I believe there is a future for the Gorillaz, but Gorillaz is quite a complicated and expensive thing to produce. So, I think we need to wait a little bit to see what happens because usually in the music industry everything changes", he told Consequence of Sound.
Finally, for some of you, who are interested whether there is another solo album on hold after Everyday Robots, that's Albarn's answer on NME: "I am doing a musical and then I might do another Gorillaz record, then I might do another solo record. I only did this album because Richard Russell asked me to do it. It had never occurred to me, but I am glad I have" and added "I have so many songs. I gave some of them to Richard for my solo record, but they were a lot more upbeat, whereas (with Everyday Robots) we made the decision for it to be a sad, slow, introspective record. So I've got a lot of songs, but I don't know if I'll use any of them."