Pink Floyd to release first new music in decades to support Ukraine – NME

Pink Floyd are set to release their first new music in 28 years tomorrow (April 8) to aid the relief effort in Ukraine.

The new track, titled ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up’, features a sample of Andriy Khlyvnyuk, the singer of Ukrainian band Boombox, and is the band’s first original music to be released since their 1994 album ‘The Division Bell’. All proceeds from the song will go to Ukraine Humanitarian Relief.

A press release reveals that Pink Floyd – who comprise David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Guy Pratt (bass) and Nitin Sawhney (keyboards) for the song – recorded ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up’ on March 30 this year, and that an accompanying video directed by Mat Whitecross has also been shot.

Discussing the new song 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.”

The singer, who has a Ukrainian family, 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.”

Discussing the creation of the track, Gilmour added: “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.”

Gilmour also discussed how he had played with Khlyvnyuk’s band in 2015 as part of a benefit gig for the Belarus Free Theatre, and that the singer was midway through a US tour with Boombox this February when he returned to his homeland to fight on the frontline against the Russians.

On ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up!’, Khlyvnyuk is sampled singing patriotic Ukranian song ‘The Red Viburnum’ in Sofiyskaya Square in the capital Kyiv, which was captured in a viral Instagram video recently sent to Gilmour.

“He stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war,” Gilmour said. “It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”

“I thought: that is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” Gilmour told the Guardian of the footage in a new interview about the comeback. “I’ve got a big platform that [Pink Floyd] have worked on for all these years. It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the fuck can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”

Gilmour then managed to speak from his hospital bed following injuries sustained in the war. “I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing,” he said. “We both hope to do something together in person in the future.”

Last month, Pink Floyd and David Gilmour removed their music from streaming services in Russia and Belarus to show their support for Ukraine.

Writing on Twitter, Pink Floyd said: “To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour’s solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia an Belarus from today.”

Gilmour added: “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.”