Four years after it was planned for release, Pink Floyd will drop the remastered version of their 10th studio album, 1977’s Animals on September 16 via Sony. The physical release will also include both standard CD and SACD formats, 12-inch vinyl and Blu-Ray. There is also a deluxe edition which will include the vinyl, CD and Blu-Ray, plus an exclusive DVD and 32-page book. Pre-orders for all of the versions can be found here.
The release includes an entirely new mix of Animals, reworked into 5.1 Stereo by sound engineer James Guthrie. Additionally, the Blu-ray and DVD releases will come with the original 1977 mix. It also includes new artwork by Aubrey Powell, who was a partner of the original cover’s artist, Storm Thorgerson, as a member of the London-based collective Hipgnosis.
Pink Floyd shared a statement on their social media where they explained that Powell took new photos of the building pictured on the ‘Animals’ cover – the Battersea Power Station on the south bank of the River Thames – during recent conversion work, adding to the narrative behind the album’s concept. Powell himself stated, “With the original 1977 album cover being such an iconic piece of stand-alone art, I had the chance to update it, which was a rather daunting task, but Hipgnosis took the opportunity to re-photograph the image to reflect a changing world, and by using modern digital colouring techniques I kept Pink Floyd’s rather bleak message of moral decay using the Orwellian themes of animals, the pig ‘Algie’, faithful to the message of the album.”
You can take a look at the cover art for the 2018 Remix edition of Animals as well as the band’s full statement on its release – below:
As the name, 2018 Remix edition suggests it was initially completed four years ago, just after the album celebrated its 40th anniversary. Unfortunately plans to release it were then axed because of a feud between guitarist David Gilmour and ex-bassist Roger Waters, which reportedly came from a dispute over the album’s newly re-written liner notes.
Waters wrote four of the album’s five songs by himself, while he and Gilmour collaborated (and shared lead vocals) on the track “Dogs”. Last June, Waters wrote in a blog post that Gilmour refused to authorise the new release unless the liner notes, written by journalist Mark Blake, were scrapped from its packaging. “[Gilmour] does not dispute the veracity of the history described in Mark’s notes,” Waters said, “but he wants that history to remain secret.” It’s unknown whether those liner notes will indeed appear on the 2018 Remix edition of Animals, but they are already publicly accessible as when he shared the Gilmour’s dissatisfaction with the liner notes, Waters posted them to his website.
Meanwhile, Pink Floyd also announced a physical release for their Ukraine benefit single “Hey Hey Rise Up”, the band’s first new material in over 25 years which arrived digitally in April. In both the UK, Europe a seven-inch vinyl and CD single will be available for purchase on July 15. However, it won’t be released in Japan until August 3 while in North America, Canada, Australia and Mexico, it will drop on October 21. The B-side will also feature a reworked version of “A Great Day For Freedom”, from Pink Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell, reimagined by David Gilmour based on the original tapes for the track.
