Pink Floyd finally releasing the 2018 remaster of Animals

Virgin Radio

1 Jul 2022, 09:49

In 2018, Pink Floyd made a remastered version of their 1977 album Animals, and four years later, it is finally ready for release. 

Landing on 16 September via Sony, the ‘2018 Remix’ edition of Animals will include both standard CD and SACD formats, a 12 inch vinyl, CD and Blu-Ray, plus an exclusive DVD and 32-page book. 

The remaster is an entirely new mix of Animals reworked into 5.1 Stereo by the master sound engineer James Guthrie. The Blu-Ray and DVD releases will also be paired with the original 1977 mix, along with new artwork by Aubrey Powell, who was a partner of the original cover artist, Storm Thorgeson, in the group Hipgnosis.

In a post shared on social media, Pink Floyd explained that Powell had taken new photos of the Battersea Power Station in London, which features on the original Animals cover, as it underwent conversion work.

Powell added: “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. 

You can check out the new cover art for the 2018 Remix edition of Animals below: 

The special edition album was finalised four years ago just after the 40th anniversary of Animals, but plans to release the special edition were axed after a feud started between David Gilmour and ex-bassist Roger Waters. 

It reportedly came down to a dispute over the album’s newly re-written liner notes. Water wrote four out of five of the album’s songs himself, while he and Gilmour collaborated on Dogs.

Last year, Waters said in a blog post that Gilmour had refused to authorise the new release unless the liner notes, written by journalist Mark Blake, were removed. 

He said: “[Gilmour] does not dispute the veracity of the history described in Mark’s notes, but he wants that history to remain a secret.”

It is not yet known whether the liner notes will appear on the special edition album, but Walter has already shared it with the above blog post on his website. 

This comes after Pink Floyd released a special single for the people of Ukraine.

The 2018 Remix of Animals will be released on 16 September and is available for pre-order here.