M.I.A. has released a new song/video off the upcoming album, which it now seems she won’t be leaking (now that it apparently has a release date: September 9), despite previous desires expressed on Twitter. The track is called “Go Off,” with the video seeing a series of explosives…going off in a desert strip-mine. In introducing the track on Annie Mac’s show on BBC 1, M.I.A. reiterated her past statements that this would be her final LP, but also said she’d continue to make music. She explained why you won’t see any people in this video — referencing how her recent big videos focused on elaborate scenes with crowds.
For the song, she collaborated with Skrillex and Blaqstarr, and in her interview, speaking of the album as a whole, she said:
I just wanted it to be happy. There’s no complaints on it. There’s another side to me completely, I don’t know if people know that.
Of course, the way you want to interpret the violent reformatting of land in the video could either be ecstatically cathartic or totally sinister. When I first watched it, my initial reaction was, “maybe this is her environmentalist video.” But then the explosions could, of course, as the lyrics go, just be about being “hella bomb” but having “to go off just to stay strong.”
[Via Rolling Stone]