Just last year, Pink Floyd released a 50th-anniversary box-set edition of their eternal classic Wish You Were Here. And because Floyd were extremely busy and productive in the '70s, they've already unveiling another 50th-anniversary anniversary version of another of their '70s classics. This time, the classic album in question is the Wish You Were Here follow-up Animals, which came out in January 1977.
Given that Animals is made up entirely of four very long songs, along with a brief intro and outro, you'd think that Floyd wouldn't have any previously unreleased tracks from that era to include on a box set. Roger Waters wrote almost every song on Animals by himself, and it's a concept album about the bleakness of life in late-'70s Great Britain, inspired by both George Orwell's Animal Farm and the initial explosion of punk. Floyd non-fans might know it as the album with the floating pig on the cover.
Animals came right in between Wish You Were Here and The Wall, and it was never as commercially huge as either of those blockbusters, but it still went quadruple platinum. The 50th-anniversary version of Animals comes out early next year in a bunch of different editions and formats, the most expansive of which will include five discs: The original album, the remixed version that came out in 2018, a set of five rarities that includes the previously unreleased Roger Waters song "Young Nicholas Jon," and a double-disc recording of the band's May 5, 1977 show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, as captured by the bootlegger Reinhard Hohlwein, who was just 19 at the time. The deluxe box set edition of Animals also includes a 64-page book that includes a new piece from Floyd fan and Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Reinhard Hohlwein, and an excerpt about making the arresting Animals cover art from Hipgnosis designer Audrey “Po” Powell’s memoir.
Today, we get to hear one of the previously unreleased tracks from the box: a radio edit of the 10-minute track that cuts the song down to four and a half minutes. It has never been commercially available until this moment. Animals 50 is out 1/22 on Sony Music.
Pre-order the box set and check out all the details about what's included here.
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