Pink Floyd's 'Animals' gets 50th anniversary box with unreleased Waters song

Pink Floyd's 1977 album "Animals" is getting a 50th anniversary reissue that includes a previously unreleased Roger Waters composition, "Young Nicholas Jon," and the first official release of a widely bootlegged 1977 concert.

Sony Music will release "Animals 50" on Jan. 22, 2027, in several formats. The centerpiece is a nine-disc deluxe box set with five CDs, three LPs and a Blu-ray. The deluxe set is available for preorder now.

Smaller editions will also be sold. Two-CD and two-LP versions pair the original album with a disc of rarities, and the Blu-ray will be offered on its own. A digital edition will carry the full contents of the box.

Rarities and a radio edit

The band left relatively little unused material from the "Animals" sessions, and the rarities disc is short. Alongside "Young Nicholas Jon," it contains early rough mixes of "Dogs" and "Sheep," a studio jam and the original radio edit of "Sheep."

That edit cuts the roughly 10-minute album track down to a length suited for FM airplay. It had been sent to radio stations but had never been sold to fans. It arrived on streaming services Thursday, when the reissue was announced, as an early preview of the set.

One track some fans expected to appear is missing. A version of "Pigs on the Wing" that merges Parts 1 and 2, which open and close the album, into one piece with added sound effects first appeared on the 1977 8-track edition of "Animals." Sony reissued it in June on the greatest-hits compilation "8-Tracks," and it will stay exclusive to that release.

The Oakland concert

The deluxe set's live component, "Live From the Oakland Coliseum," documents the band's May 9, 1977, show over 13 tracks. Reinhard Hohlwein, a bootlegger who was 19 at the time, made the recording. The concert has long circulated among Pink Floyd fans in unofficial copies.

The set list includes "Animals" and its predecessor, "Wish You Were Here," played in full, along with "Money" and "Us and Them" from "The Dark Side of the Moon." It closes with "Careful With That Axe, Eugene," the only time the band performed the instrumental on that tour. It was also the final time Pink Floyd ever played it live.

Pink Floyd made few, if any, professional recordings of its concerts in the mid- and late 1970s. According to Variety, the Hohlwein recording has been mixed and mastered to a quality near professional standards. Sony took a similar approach in April, when it released an upgraded bootleg of an April 26, 1975, show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena for Record Store Day.

The concert fills two CDs in the deluxe box and also appears on the Blu-ray and in the digital edition. It is not part of the two-CD or two-LP versions.

The Blu-ray holds the original 1977 stereo mix, the 2018 remix in stereo, 5.1 surround and Dolby Atmos, a stereo mix of the rarities and the Oakland show.

Disc two in the box is the 2018 remix of the album. Despite its name, that version did not come out until 2022, after Waters and his former bandmates clashed over its liner notes and other matters.

Only buyers of the deluxe set will get its 64-page hardcover book. It features liner notes by author Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Hohlwein and an excerpt from a memoir by Aubrey "Po" Powell of the design firm Hipgnosis describing how the album's cover was made. The book also has previously unpublished photos from the recording sessions, the 1977 tour and the cover shoot at London's Battersea Power Station, the site of the album's famous flying pig image. The building is slated to become a music venue.

Sony has been mining the band's archives since buying the rights to all of Pink Floyd's music in 2024, a deal Variety estimated at $400 million. The band issued a 50th anniversary edition of "Wish You Were Here" last year.

Members of Pink Floyd have said they are not actively involved in the catalog upgrades since the sale. Still, statements from Waters and David Gilmour accompanied the announcement.

Gilmour linked the album's sound to the rise of punk in 1977, which he suspects affected how the band worked in the studio. He said the record drifted away from the atmospheric style of "Wish You Were Here."

"This album is more in your face and more rough and ready," Gilmour said, adding that Waters' lyrics were far more aggressive. "We had a lot of fun making it."