Four years after it was initially due to come out, Pink Floyd will release a remastered version of their 10th studio album, 1977’s Animals, this September.
Dubbed the ‘2018 Remix’ edition of Animals, the album will land on September 16 via Sony. The physical release will include both standard CD and SACD formats, 12-inch vinyl and Blu-Ray. A deluxe edition – slated to ship on October 7 – 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 selling point for this release is an entirely new mix of Animals, reworked into 5.1 Stereo by legendary sound engineer James Guthrie. On the Blu-Ray and DVD releases, this will be paired with the original 1977 mix. It also sports new artwork by Aubrey “Po” Powell, who was a partner of the original cover’s artist, Storm Thorgerson, as a member of the London-based collective Hipgnosis.
In a statement shared on social media, Pink Floyd 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 said: “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.”
Have 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 implied by its name, the ‘2018 Remix’ edition of Animals was finalised four years ago, just after the album celebrated its 40th anniversary. Plans to release it then were axed because of a feud between guitarist David Gilmour and ex-bassist Roger Waters, which reportedly stemmed from a dispute over the album’s newly re-written liner notes.
Waters wrote four of the album’s five songs entirely 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 – when he shared the above claims of Gilmour’s dissatisfaction with them, Waters posted them to his website.
Meanwhile, last week saw Pink Floyd announce a physical release for their Ukraine benefit single “Hey Hey Rise Up”, which marked the band’s first new song in 25 years when it arrived digitally in April. In the UK, Europe and selected other markets, a seven-inch vinyl and CD single will be available on July 15. It will be released on August 3 in Japan, while in North America, Canada, Australia and Mexico, it will arrive on October 21.
The B-side will 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.