Pink Floyd to Release First Newly Conceived Single as a Band Since 1994, Borrowing Ukrainian Singer’s Lead Vocal

variety.com:

Chris Willman Music WriterPink Floyd has announced that a newly recorded single under the band banner, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” will come out Friday, with lead vocals not by David Gilmour but rather a Ukrainian singer, whose a cappella vocals from an Instagram post shot in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square have been set to music by the veteran band.The music for the new song was recorded March 30 by longtime members Gilmour and Nick Mason, along with longtime bass player Guy Pratt and keyboardist Nitin Sawhney. (Roger Waters, who split from the group in the mid-1980s, did not participate.)The vocalist grafted into the new Pink Floyd track is Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the Ukrainian band Boombox.

The vocal is taken from an Instagram video he posted five weeks ago in which he sings a World War I-era Ukrainian protest song, “The Red Viburnum In The Meadow,” which has seen a revival as a cry against the Russian war upon Ukraine.

The final line of the song translates as “Hey hey, rise up and rejoice.” Khlyvnyuk is now in a hospital in Kyiv with a mortar shrapnel wound. “I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing,” Gilmour said in a statement. “We both hope to do something together in person in the future.”An announcement declared that “Hey Hey Rise Up” is “the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994’s ‘The Division Bell.'” The group is understood to have been basically retired as a going unit since the late ’90s, although a mostly instrumental album of adapted leftovers, “The Endless River,” came out in 2014 and was declared to be their official swan song.Gilmour’s interest in bringing the band out of effective retirement for this is personal: he has a Ukrainian.