About

Demon Days is the name of the second studio album by the virtual British music and visual project Gorillaz^[1], released in May 2005. Its cover art is often parodied online due to its highly exploitable layout of four portraits set up in white boxes on a black background.

Origin

Gorillaz is a virtual band of cartoon characters created by frontman of Britpop band Blur Damon Albarm^[2] and co-creator of the comic Tank Girl, Jamie Hewlett.^[3] The band, consisting of four animated members, released their first self-titled album in March 2001, which sold more than 7 million copies and earned them a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Successful Virtual Band.^[4] Their second album Demon Days^[5] was released in May 2005. The album artwork, which was inspired by the Beatles’ 1970 album Let It Be, features the caricatures of four bandmates, bassist Murdoc (shown top, left) vocalist 2-D (shown top, right), guitarist Noodle (shown bottom, left) and drummer Russel (shown bottom, right). The album peaked at #1 in the United Kingdom and France, while reaching #2 in Australia, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand. Online, tracks from the album have been played on Last.FM^[6] more than 35 million times.

The first parody of the cover was created by deviantArt user bundycoot^[8] on August 16th, 2005, replacing the Gorillaz members with characters from the children’s television show Kim Possible.

Spread

Later that year in October 2005, additional spoof images began appearing on music humor site Am I Right?^[7] and continued to be shared on deviantArt^[9], where there are more than 3000 pieces of art tagged “Demon Days.” In 2009, a tutorial video^[10] on how to create these images in Photoshop was uploaded via YouTube. Additional parody images have been shared on 4chan^[11], Feedio.net^[13], Bronibooru^[14] and Equestria Daily^[12], including a mashup of Demon Days tracks set to the soundtrack from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic titled "Discord Days."

Notable Examples

Search Interest

While there is no visible search traffic specifically associated with parodies of the album art, general search interest for the album title "Demon Days" peaked in March 2005.

External References