Hallelujah Money: Gorillaz’s anti-Trump track puts a playful spin on dark times

Starring Mercury Prize winner Benjamin Clementine, the group’s first track in seven years couldn’t arrive at a better time

Power and greed will be running themes of 2017, thanks to a who’s who of millionaire nepotists all starting life in the Trump administration from Friday. With that in mind, Gorillaz’s return, via the damning Hallelujah Money, couldn’t be better timed.

Mercury Prize winner Benjamin Clementine takes a starring role, leading the track and appearing in an accompanying video. Filmed in the mirror image of the 45th President’s gold-plated Trump Tower, a green screen places him in front of killers clowns, cartoon rainbows and the KKK. Throughout, he never stops staring directly into the camera.

In his signature baritone, Clementine damns Donald’s “tremendous wall” to nothing but a pipe dream by comparing it to a “unicorn”, while Damon Albarn’s brief cameo finds him asking: “We are still human / How will we know? How will we dream? How will we love?” There’s a mix between optimism — the belief that the worst outcome of this Presidency might never happen — and the fear that through what’s occurring now, the fabric of human existence might eventually erode.

Money prevailed in Trump’s campaign. Somehow, a man who boasted of his gross riches and of how his tax-dodging exploits made him “smart” managed to convince ordinary people that he understood their day-to-day lives. By spinning the phrase “Hallelujah money!” into a cheery but deranged chant, Clementine and Gorillaz give cash the holy position it seems to command over politics.

A stuttering, ever-shifting return, Gorillaz’s first song in seven years is just as musically uncertain as the current outside world. Less an antidote, more a reflection on how evil currently prevails, it takes aim at big business and considers just how low humanity could truly go if things continue on a downward spiral. But the message is delivered in a balancing act truly fitting of Gorillaz: somehow combining playfulness and abject fear.