Midnight Oil to burn again with new music released on Friday
The band’s new song Gadigal Land is a preview of mini-album The Makarrata Project, featuring Indigenous artists.
Sydney rock band Midnight Oil will release its first new music in almost two decades on Friday with a song that will offer a preview of a themed mini-album due in late October.
Gadigal Land is named for Sydney’s traditional owners, and the song is said to be a provocative recount of what happened there — and elsewhere in Australia — since colonisation in 1788. It will be the first release from The Makarrata Project, an upcoming collection composed of collaborations with Indigenous artists.
The project’s name is a nod to the Uluru Statement From the Heart, which in 2017 called for the establishment of a First Nations voice to be enshrined in the Australian Constitution, and for a Makarrata Commission to oversee treaty-making and truth-telling between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
“We’ve always been happy to lend our voice to those who call for racial justice, but it really feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said the band in a statement released on Monday. “We urge the federal government to heed the messages in the Uluru Statement From The Heart and act accordingly.”
“Hopefully this song and The Makarrata Project mini-album we’ve created alongside our First Nations friends can help shine a bit more light on the urgent need for genuine reconciliation in this country and in many other places too.”
Vocalists Dan Sultan, Kaleena Briggs and Bunna Lawrie each make an appearance in Gadigal Land, in addition to a lyrical section written and delivered by Gadigal poet Joel Davison.
It will be the first new music from the Oils since the band’s 2002 album Capricornia.
After deciding to reform for a 2017 world tour that sold about 500,000 tickets across 77 concerts in 16 countries, the musicians returned to the studio late last year following a European tour and a headline appearance at the Big Red Bash music festival in far western Queensland.
The group had entered the studio with about 20 songs, seven of which revolved around themes of reconciliation, which they decided to record separately with a range of indigenous collaborators.
The rest of the new recordings are set for release next year, while both sessions were overseen by British producer Warne Livesey, who was behind the desk for the band’s 1987 album Diesel & Dust, as well as for 1990’s Blue Sky Mining and 11th album Capricornia.
Diesel & Dust was preceded by a tour through remote Australia with the Warumpi Band in 1986, which opened the Sydneysiders’ eyes to aspects of Indigenous Australian life and culture that few popular artists had dared to reckon with at that time.
The Blackfella/Whitefella tour inspired the band’s global hit Beds Are Burning, which the band later performed at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 while wearing black jumpsuits prominently stamped with ‘Sorry’, the word that then prime minister John Howard would not say to members of the Stolen Generations.
On Saturday night, an in-studio performance of Gadigal Land will make its world premiere during the National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMAs) telecast, which will screen on NITV from 7pm as well as online via Facebook and YouTube.
By offering the Gadigal Land video to the live awards broadcast from Darwin, the band will channel its global popularity towards promoting a lesser-known event that may otherwise be overlooked by music fans here and overseas.
Finalists in seven categories at the NIMAs include hip-hop artist Baker Boy and R&B newcomer Miiesha, both of whom are nominated three times, while artists vying for album of the year include Archie Roach, Jessica Mauboy, Mau Power, Ray Dimakarri Dixon and Miiesha.
Midnight Oil will donate its share of any proceeds it receives from The Makarrata Project to organisations which seek to elevate the Uluru Statement from the Heart in particular, and Indigenous reconciliation more broadly. Its record label Sony Music will match any artist contribution.
The spread of COVID-19 disrupted what the band had planned for this year. Originally set to be launched with a performance at the Splendour in the Grass music festival near Byron Bay in July, the mini-album release was rescheduled once the festival moved its dates to October.
But with Splendour in the Grass later abandoning its 2020 event entirely, the band decided not to wait any longer to release a work that was particularly topical given the global surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the renewed domestic focus on Aboriginal deaths in custody following a series of protests across the country.