Beloved British prog-rockers Pink Floyd have announced that tomorrow, on April 8th, they will be releasing their first music in 28 years. The new song will be in aid of the relief effort in Ukraine. You can pre-save it here.
1/3 Tonight at midnight, Pink Floyd will release a new song, ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’, which sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by Guy Pratt & Nitin Sawhney, with an extraordinary vocal by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.
Listen/download at https://t.co/i1l92D3AYU— Pink Floyd (@pinkfloyd) April 7, 2022
The band’s forthcoming new song is entitled “Hey, Hey, Rise Up”, and is their first brand new, freshly recorded musical release since The Division Bell, which was released back in 1994. The tune features a sample from Andriy Khlyvnyuk, who is the frontman of Ukrainian band Boombox. According to NME, a press release stated that Pink Floyd- which currently consists of David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney- recorded the new song on March 30th. The release of the single will also be paired with a music video, directed by Mat Whitecross. The sample of Khlyvnyuk is from a viral video of the Boombox frontman singing a patriotic Ukrainian song entitled “The Red Viburnum” at Sofiskaya Square in the country’s capital city, Kyiv. The moving video can be viewed at the link below.
Трішки мотивації від лідера гурту «Бумбокс» Андрія Хливнюка pic.twitter.com/VQFdRjahGF — Armed Forces (@ArmedForcesUkr) February 28, 2022
In a statement, Gilmour said: “I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities, and raise morale. We want express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.”. Gilmour added: “We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers.”
Gilmour went on to talk about the creation of the track, saying: “We recorded the track and video in our barn where we did all our Von Trapped Family live streams during lockdown. It’s the same room that we did the ‘Barn Jams’ with Rick Wright back in 2007. Janina Pedan made the set in a day and we had Andriy singing on the screen while we played, so the four of us had a vocalist, albeit not one who was physically present with us.”
Of the conflict, Gilmour said: “Russian soldiers, stop killing your brothers. There will be no winners in this war. My daughter in law is Ukrainian and my granddaughters want to visit and know their beautiful country. Stop this before it is all destroyed.”
