Plastic Beach by Gorillaz

Plastic Beach, the third Gorillaz album, washed up on 3 March 2010, and for the first time Damon Albarn produced the cartoon band himself. It grew out of an abandoned project called Carousel that he and Jamie Hewlett started kicking around in late 2007, and he recorded it between June 2008 and November 2009 in London, New York and Damascus.

The concept is an island built from the ocean's garbage somewhere in the South Pacific, and the music is glossy, melancholy synth-pop shot through with hip-hop, funk and orchestral swells. The guest list is gloriously unlikely: Snoop Dogg, De La Soul, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, Mark E. Smith, Gruff Rhys and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano. "Stylo", "Superfast Jellyfish" and "On Melancholy Hill" were the singles, it debuted at number two in both Britain and America, and the tour that followed finally put the real musicians in plain view.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.