New M.I.A. album due this summer

January 11th, 2010

Grant Trimboli

Courtesy of Pitchfork:

Hey, new M.I.A. album! Awesome! The agit-pop queenpin told Rolling Stone a little bit about her forthcoming Kala follow-up, supposedly due this summer. (This would presumably be the album that Diplo called “Gucci Mane meets Animal Collective”.) And to hear Maya tell it, this thing’s going to be even loonier than anyone could’ve guessed.

M.I.A. tells RS that she recorded much of it with Baltimore club upstart Blaqstarr producing. Blaqstarr previously collaborated with M.I.A. on the Kala track “The Turn” and on the Tom Waits sorta-cover “Way Down in the Hole”. She tells Rolling Stone that Blaqstarr “simply makes music that sounds good, and I needed that.”

But Blaqstarr isn’t the album’s only collaborator. M.I.A. also says that she recorded a song called (seriously) “I’m Down Like Your Internet Connection” with a group of Filipino Verizon workers. She says, “I was having issues with my cable and wireless, and I was on the phone [with tech support] for three hours, and I thought, ‘Maybe this needs to be part of my music, could you just learn these lyrics and sing it down the phone to me?’ 10 phone calls later, I have Internet that sticks and a song.”

She also says that she’s both singing and rapping on this one: “I just stopped singing on the last one because I put more emphasis into production, so I was more about making beats and sang less on my last album.” And she gives another sample song title: “I Fight the Ones That Fight Me”.

On a more general level, though, she’s thoughtful and reserved when talking about the new LP: “The last album, I didn’t actually sit anywhere long enough for it to really be in my life and to really think about it. Now I’m putting out my next album, and the world has changed. I came up talking shit about Bush, and it’s great that it’s changed, but I don’t know how much it’s changed, and I’m exploring that … I just want to be real, whatever that is. Even if my songs are shit, and if I have flaws and if I’m confused, if I offend people or if I don’t offend people, I might try to work it out in public– just so you know that it’s OK to think that thinking’s not a dirty word.”