Pink Floyd Release New Track, ‘Hey Hey, Rise Up!’ To Aid The Ukraine Relief Effort
Pink Floyd have released their first new music in decades 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 30 March this year. You can listen to the song below. via its accompanying video directed by Mat Whitecross.
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.”
Last month, Pink Floyd and David Gilmour removed their music from streaming services in Russia and Belarus to show their support for Ukraine.