M.I.A.'s fourth album, Matangi, will be released in April, she tells Australia's Gold Coast Bulletin. "It's due in April, which is the Tamil new year—April 15th—and I'm still working on it," she says. M.I.A. says she thought she had finished the record, once slated for December 2012, but returned to the studio after receiving feedback from her parent label, Interscope.
I thought I'd finished it. I finished it and then I handed the record in, like a couple of months ago… At the moment, I've been told it's too positive. So we're having a bit of an issue at the label. They're like, 'You need to like darken it up a bit'. I don't know what it is but as soon as I work that out… I'm taking my time to decide what they mean. It's an interesting one for me… It's like 'We just built you up as the public enemy No. 1 and now you're coming out with all this positive stuff.'
Interscope partnered with M.I.A. to distribute releases from her own N.E.E.T label in 2008. Matangi will be released jointly by N.E.E.T, XL Mercury and Interscope. Taking time to tweak the LP to the satisfaction of her label is part of "the point of being positive," M.I.A. told Gold Coast. In August, she answered fan-submitted questions about Matangi on Twitter, calling the record a "fuck you" to industry critics and likening its sound to "Paul Simon on acid."
M.I.A. released an autobiographical art tome last fall. Experience her November MoMA PS1 lecture about the book in GIFs here.
