Ra Ra Riot – “Water” (Feat. Rostam Batmanglij)

Ra Ra Riot – “Water” (Feat. Rostam Batmanglij)

Ra Ra Riot will release their fourth album, Need Your Light, early next year, the followup to 2013’s Beta Love. They’re kicking things off with lead single “Water,” which was co-written and produced by Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij. He goes a ways back with the Syracuse-based band — Batmanglij and vocalist Wesley Miles teamed up under the name Discovery and released their one and only album together in 2009. Who knows if we’ll ever get a second Discovery record (I hope we do!), but this seems like the next best thing. Check out the new track and some album details below.

Here’s what Batmanglij had to say about the collab in a press release:

Between 2005-2009, Wes and I wrote an album together in snatched moments in our lives… That record (the Discovery LP) seemed to benefit from us having the freedom to pick it up and put it down. In January of this year, Wes came to stay with me, and we set out to write songs again. We didn’t know where it would take us. There was something I’d heard in Wes’s singing in the earliest days of seeing Ra Ra Riot live that I felt had never quite been captured on record. There was our shared love of U2’s Achtung Baby, something that having listened to the music we’ve recorded in our lives thus far you might not know about. And also this obsession with writing songs that tell stories. So we spent five days writing just two songs- “Water” and “I Need Your Light”- and I think we found that same freedom in making these songs that we had found years ago making the Discovery record, not knowing where it would take us.

Tracklist:
01 “Water”
02 “Absolutely”
03 “Foreign Lovers”
04 “I Need Your Light”
05 “Bad Times”
06 “Call Me Out”
07 “Instant Breakup”
08 “Every Time I’m Ready To Hug”
09 “Bouncy Castle”
10 “Suckers”

Need Your Light is out 2/19 via Barsuk.

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