Laurie Anderson has released “India And On Down to Australia,” a track featuring Anohni, from her new album, Amelia, due August 30 on Nonesuch. You can hear it below. Amelia is the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient’s first new album since 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall. The record comprises twenty-two tracks about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight. Anderson, who Pitchfork says, “sees the future, but she starts by paying attention,” wrote the music and lyrics for this subjective narrative piece. On the album, she is joined by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota, and Kenny Wollesen.

“The rhythm was from an unreleased song called ‘Rumba Club’ that I always wanted to use as something,” Anderson says of the new track. “It was recorded during pandemic times. And so the orchestra recorded their part, and then it came to me to put the electronics and voice on it. And I thought, ‘I need to make the story a little bit bigger, so I’m going to find a bridge between the electronic viola that I’m playing and the orchestra,' so that became percussion by Kenny Wollesen, bass by Tony Scherr, viola by Martha Mooke—a little string trio that was organized by Rob Moose, with Nadia Sirota playing as well. And then Marc Ribot doing some groove parts and of course Anohni. So it became this big romantic orchestral thing.”

“With Anderson at the controls, imagining what it’s like to fly, it flows as if in a dream state," Uncut says of the new album. "Propelled by an orchestral score that conjures the serenity and anxiety of flight. Anderson’s admiration and affection for this feminist icon is such that you come away from Amelia with a greater respect for those who keep on taking risks ... Anderson heightens the drama as Earhart's flight nears its watery end. The music of ‘India And On Down to Australia’ is melodious and dreamy as excitement builds.”

Amelia Earhart was a passionate pioneer of early aviation, achieving fame as the first woman to cross the Atlantic, in 1932. Five years later, she embarked on a flight around the world. Before she could complete the voyage, her plane disappeared without a trace; it has never been found. “The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think about,” Anderson says. First premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2000, the updated piece was recently performed across Europe.

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than forty years. In a recent 60 Minutes profile, Anderson Cooper said she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but ... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn’t sold in galleries. It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention ... she [blends] the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life,” and the Guardian has called Anderson “one of the great popular artists and storytellers of our time.”

Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically lauded Life on a String. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002), Homeland (2010), the soundtrack to Anderson’s acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Additionally, Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.

Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date. Anderson recently toured with Sex Mob, performing her piece Let X=X. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honor: Asteroid 270588, Laurieanderson.

Factory International presents the world premiere of a major new live stage work, ARK: United States Part V, at Manchester’s landmark cultural venue, Aviva Studios, November 14-24, 2024. Fueled by Anderson’s fascination with humanity’s current reality, ARK brings together new music, cinematic imagery, stories, and songs in an imaginative and personal interrogation of where we are now, asking: what has brought us here and how much time do we have left?

Nonesuch released a re-mastered edition of Anderson’s landmark 1982 album Big Science in 2007 for its twenty-fifth anniversary, followed by a vinyl LP re-issue in 2021; its beloved single, “O Superman,” became a surprise viral hit on TikTok earlier this year.