Ra Ra Riot Announce Need Your Light, Share “Water”, a Collaboration With Vampire Weekend’s Rostam

Ra Ra Riot Announce Need Your Light, Share "Water", a Collaboration With Vampire Weekend's Rostam

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Ra Ra Riot have announced a new album, Need Your Light. The follow-up to 2013′s Beta Love is out February 19, 2016 via Barsuk Records. They’ve also shared the first song from the album, “Water”, which is a collaboration with Vampire Weekend‘s Rostam Batmanglij. Watch the lyric video for it and find the album tracklist and art below.

Need Your Light was produced by Ryan Hadlock, except for “Water” and “I Need Your Light”, which were produced by Batmanglij.

Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot vocalist Wes Miles have previously worked together as the duo Discovery. They released one album, LP, in 2009. Speaking about their latest collaboration in a press release, Batmanglij said:

Between 2005-2009, Wes and I wrote an album together in snatched moments in our lives… That record (the Discovery LP) seemed to benefit from us having the freedom to pick it up and put it down. In January of this year, Wes came to stay with me, and we set out to write songs again. We didn’t know where it would take us. There was something I’d heard in Wes’s singing in the earliest days of seeing Ra Ra Riot live that I felt had never quite been captured on record. There was our shared love of U2′s Achtung Baby, something that having listened to the music we’ve recorded in our lives thus far you might not know about. And also this obsession with writing songs that tell stories. So we spent five days writing just two songs- “Water” and “I Need Your Light”- and I think we found that same freedom in making these songs that we had found years ago making the Discovery record, not knowing where it would take us.

Need Your Light:

01 Water
02 Absolutely
03 Foreign Lovers
04 I Need Your Light
05 Bad Times
06 Call Me Out
07 Instant Breakup
08 Every Time I’m Ready to Hug
09 Bouncy Castle
10 Suckers

Watch Rostam Batmanglij with Vampire Weekend on Pitchfork.tv’s “Over/Under”:

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