Shaky YouTube footage and TwitVid sneak peek aside, this is our first real taste of the new M.I.A. album, which is due out in June. Perhaps Diplo wasn’t entirely messing with us when he appended his claim that the new album would be “Animal Collective/gospel/giant-drum record” with this little nugget: “We did, like, a punk thing… It’s weird.”
There’s certainly some punk/acid rock in this stew (Stereogum says M.I.A. wrote the track with Suicide’s Alan Vega), as they most likely saved the “Wall of Sound, Motown kind of thing” for a different track.
MGMT and Gaga, take heed: this is what I would call pushing the envelope and challenging the mainstream. Listen to M.I.A.’s “Born Free” below (via P4K):