Over the coming weeks, you’ll start hearing about some of the specific things we’re doing in 2020, so before all that starts we wanted to tell you directly about the broad brushstrokes.
After coming home from Europe via Birdsville in mid-2019 we started recording new music together for the first time in nearly two decades. Our mate Warne Livesey travelled from Toronto to Sydney to produce these sessions just as he did on Diesel & Dust, Blue Sky Mining and Capricornia. It felt good to be back in the studio, and intriguing to see where it all ended up.
We had over 20 songs we wanted to record and eight of them shared a strong focus on the issue of indigenous reconciliation, so we invited some of our First Nations friends to collaborate with us in various ways on each of these eight tracks. Our collective work will be released as a mini-album called The Makarrata Project in June/July. Band profits from this release will be donated to charities which elevate The Uluru Statement From The Heart (ulurustatement.org/the-statement). This mid-year release of The Makarrata Project will be accompanied by a small handful of themed live performances in Australia featuring some of the very special guests who helped create this mini-album.
Then toward the end of the year we’ll release a new Midnight Oil album which is currently at final mixing stage. This completely separate batch of material deals with various lyrical themes including climate chaos, no surprise after the mega fires we’ve just experienced in Australia. We plan to follow the album with lots more Australian and international touring across late 2020 and early 2021.
Over the next 12 months we will also be releasing various singles from both The Makarrata Project mini-album and the new Midnight Oil album. We’re seriously excited about all of these songs and the two separate works on which they will feature. Stay tuned for more detailed announcements about our new music and our touring plans. Thanks in the meantime for your patience … we know it’s been a long wait but good things take time!
Very Best
Midnight Oil