It’s always been hard to take Gorillaz totally seriously. After all, the side project of Blur’s Damon Albarn and Tank Girl co-creator Jamie Hewlett is comprised of cartoon characters: Albarn’s daffy-voiced singer 2D, drummer Russel Hobbs, bassist Murdoc Niccals, and adolescent guitarist Noodle—each with their own arc over the course of the band’s nearly 20 years. Where most successful groups have carefully canned histories on the “bio” sections of their Wikipedia pages, Gorillaz have a “backstory.”

Knowledge of these characters isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy “Feel Good Inc.,” but Gorillaz remain one of the few working bands with a genuine mythology around them. It helps that Albarn and Hewlett strongly committed to the bit from the beginning: Del the Funky Homosapien’s verse on “Clint Eastwood” wasn’t just a guest appearance; it was the manifestation of a ghost (also named Del) who lived inside of Russ’ body. (All of his friends were murdered and their ghosts took up residence in his corporeal form, or so the story goes.) Russel also does interviews, and Noodle is literally a brand ambassador for Jaguar Racing. They even wrote an autobiography, Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre, in “collaboration” with frequent collaborator Cass Browne (a real human, to be sure); the book largely takes the form of an oral history… from cartoons. So while Gorillaz aren’t “real,” they definitely exist.

The mutability of Gorillaz as something totally subject to the whims of Albarn and Hewlett is reflective of the various incarnations and characters of the masked rapper DOOM, whose MF DOOM, Metal Fingers, King Geedorah, and Viktor Vaughn personae frequently interact on records (and who, coincidentally, appears on Gorillaz’s 2005 LP Demon Days). With all of this in mind, it might be more useful to think of Gorillaz as less of a band than an alternate reality game.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, an alternate reality game (ARG) is essentially a form of interactive storytelling, using elements from theater, geocaching, cryptography, and, most frequently, the internet (often via message boards). Players find “rabbit holes” seamlessly integrated into everyday life, and pursue to them to find a series of challenges and an unfolding narrative. Early ARGs were largely tied to the release of massive pop culture products—the movie A.I., the video game Halo 2, and so on—but took on a life of their own, often being enjoyed separately from the thing they were supposed to be promoting.

One of the hallmarks of ARGs is a willingness to blend media. The life cycle of a Gorillaz record, which is simultaneously the product, an audio narrative, a new set of online tools for “interacting” with the band (through a fresh website, social media accounts, etc.), a jumping-off point for visual storytelling—all tied to an ongoing story about a bunch of fictional characters—is essentially an ARG by itself. Though ARGs have become far more sophisticated (and ubiquitous) in the past few years, their heyday is decidedly evocative of the Demon Days era. Even if the Gorillaz designs get sleeker, the band will still look (and probably feel) like a product of the early Bush years, from its anime-inspired appearance to the sloppily rendered images in some of the early videos that look like they’re from a Half Life game.

In particular, the band’s web presence has long been a way of fleshing out the story beyond albums. Kong Studios, the Gorillaz website described in Rise of the Ogre as possessing an “unprecedented level of interactivity,” depicted the studios where Noodle, Murdoc, 2D, and Russel lived and worked, full of hidden Easter eggs about the characters, and secret rooms. Most of the original Kong Studios site is maintained in archive form—if you want to poke around, you just need to download Adobe Shockwave.