M.I.A. Announces New Album Title, Release Date

Sri Lankan musician and activist M.I.A. has revealed that her new album AIM will be released on Sept. 9. The album will follow the singer’s last release, 2013’s Matangi.

The announcement comes on the heels of the singer sharing the lyrics to her collaboration with Skrillex titled “Go Off,” due out this Friday. She also threatened to leak the album on Monday.

Earlier today, M.I.A. shared a text via Twitter written by Sinthujan Varatharajah, who recently published a critique on M.I.A.’s video for “Borders.” The text focused on both the singer and the writer’s views on the ongoing refugee crisis. The text, titled “M.I.A.//A.I.M.,” ends by saying:

In the absence of privacy and basic rights, [Borderland] inhabitants are forced to constantly renegotiate boundaries and create new laws. It’s a place where new global orders are created, where new encounters occur, where new cultures are formed, where new people are born: REFUGEES.

Following the text, a message reads, “GO OFF First single on the 15.7.16,” followed by “AIM 9/9.” A representative of M.I.A. has confirmed the release date of the album.

M.I.A. has stated that this will be her last album for her American label, Interscope Records.

Read the full text below.

Survivors of war, conflict and genocide live on as IDPs and refugees, dispersed across their homelands and the globe. They embody the violence that has displaced them into the unknown, into uncertainty and into camps and council estates. Survivors crossed countless continents, countries and borders, leaving behind their homes, lives and dead only to be rendered invisible, silent and forgotten in exile; only to be told that their bodies might have travelled but their stories have not. Their narratives are construed as exchangeable, mutable and nuisance while their bodies are considered collateral damage. Survivors are treated as a surplus people whose very presence destabilizes the status quo, whose voices unsettle the known.

As border-crossers, modern day nomads, governments worldwide have tried to clamp down on their movements by criminalizing them and locking them up into camps and into poverty. The demobilization of survivors led to the creation of new states for the stateless, separate and legally distinct from the territory they sought asylum in. They are placed on the periphery of power, between ambiguity, invisibility and nostalgia. Places where survival is the prime strategy of coping, where trauma continues to set the pathway for tomorrow, where breathing is a luxury you look for elsewhere. BORDERLANDS. Borderlands are places doomed as hopeless, lifeless and futureless, where joy can never be traced, where dreams cannot be woven, where the everyday is thought to be absent. They are imagined to be places of nightmares held captive by the traumata of the displaced, kept under a never ending state of emergency. It is a country larger than England, yet isolated from its surrounding. Born in the present tense only to be trapped in the past tense. Borderlands house people from all walks of life who are cramped into undignified shelters surrounded by barbed wires. In the absence of privacy and basic rights, its inhabitants are forced to constantly renegotiate boundaries and create new laws. It’s a place where new global orders are created, where new encounters occur, where new cultures are formed, where new people are born: REFUGEES.