On January 22nd, 2027 Sony Music will reissue Pink Floyd’s renowned 1977 album Animals. The record was an exploration of society as viewed through the lens of the band. Over the course of five tracks, the original Animals recording explored the sociopolitical climate of the era as depicted via the lives of dogs, pigs and sheep, a message that still resonates five decades later.
Animals 50 will be released in multiple formats, including a Deluxe Box Set, 1LP, 2LP, 2CD, Blu-Ray Audio and digital. The Deluxe Box Set offers 3 LPs (the original 1977 album, the 2018 Remix remixed by James Guthrie and a disc of five rarities that includes an unheard Roger Waters track titled ‘Young Nicholas Jon’). It also offers a 2-disc set of the May 9, 1977 Oakland Coliseum show surreptitiously recorded live at the Oakland Coliseum Arena by 19-year-old Reinhard Hohlwein.
The Deluxe Box Set includes a 64-page hardback book comprising new sleeve notes by novelist and Floyd fan Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Hohlwein, and an excerpt from Hipgnosis’ Aubrey “Po” Powell’s memoir about the making of Animals’ album art. It also includes some previously unpublished images from the studio sessions and tour.
Roger Waters says of the original art: “I’d driven past Battersea Power Station every day going to and from my house in Clapham. I guess I just loved the building. I liked its symbolism that it’s a power station and that it belches smoke, so there’s something menacing about it. It’s got four phallic chimneys, and it looks like an upside down table. And there were four people in the band that had been turned upside down. It seemed like a really cool place for a pig to fly.”
David Gilmour comments on the album as whole: “The mood in music was changing in ’77. Punk music was hitting everything and I suspect that had a little bit of an influence on the way we were working on the Animals album. I mean it’s quite an aggressive, stripped-back album. It was moving away from the sort of soundscapes that we had on Wish You Were Here. This album is more in your face and more rough and ready. And definitely the lyrics are a lot more aggressive from Roger. We had a lot of fun making it.”
Nick Mason notes: “There were all sorts of differences beginning to surface within the band but in some ways Animals was a remarkably cohesive enterprise. The big thing was the development of Britannia Row. Britannia Row was this building we’d bought some few years before in which we’d actually started building our own recording studio. We tried to design the studio in such a way that any of us could operate it and all the trunking was labelled clearly so anyone could plug in a set of headphones without someone else having to do it for us.”
In conjunction with Animals 50, “Sheep (Original Radio Edit)” is now streaming. This is a four and a half minute, promo-only edit of the song made for radio in 1977.
