M.I.A. announces new album AIM

M.I.A. knows how to get people to pay attention.

Earlier this year, M.I.A. threatened to leak to her next album but has now announced it will be released in September. With the title AIM, it continues on her tradition of naming her full-lengths after her family and herself. Its first single ‘Go Off’, which is produced by Skrillex, will be released tomorrow.

With the announcement, she’s released a statement from scholar S. Varatharajah on the treatment of refugees: “As border-crossers, modern day nomads, governments worldwide have tried to clamp down on their movements by criminalising them and locking them up into camps and into poverty. The demobilisation of survivors led to the creation of new states for the stateless, separate and legally distinct from the territory they sought asylum in. They are placed on the periphery of power, between ambiguity, invisibility and nostalgia. Places where survival is the prime strategy of coping, where trauma continues to set the pathway for tomorrow, where breathing is a luxury you look for elsewhere.” (More on M.I.A.’s site.)

M.I.A. is scheduled to headline London’s first outpost of Afropunk on September 24, despite earlier controversy. AIM is out September 9.