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Ra Ra Riot Announce New Album, ‘Need Your Light’

Ra Ra Riot have announced plans to release the follow-up to 2013’s Beta Love. The new album is called Need Your Light and will be available on February 19, 2016 via Barsuk Records.

To celebrate, the band has shared the first song from the record called “Water,” a collaboration with Vampire Weekend‘s Rostam Batmanglij, who produced it and the album’s title track (the rest was helmed by Ryan Hadlock).

Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles also worked together in 2009 as Discovery, and they released an LP that same year. Here’s a statement from Batmanglij on their latest project:

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.

Check out the album’s track list, and hear “Water” below.

Need Your Light track list:

1. “Water”
2. “Absolutely”
3. “Foreign Lovers”
4. “I Need Your Light”
5. “Bad Times”
6. “Call Me Out”
7. “Instant Breakup”
8. “Every Time I’m Ready to Hug”
9. “Bouncy Castle”
10. “Suckers”