Pink Floyd's Animals turns 50 with a 22 January box set, a lost Roger Waters song and a 1977 Oakland bootleg

Pink Floyd are marking 50 years of Animals with a full anniversary edition, Animals 50, out on 22 January 2027 on Sony Music. The band's official site lists it as coming in January 2027, and pre-orders are open.

Animals came out in January 1977: five tracks, a pig floating over Battersea Power Station, and an album built loosely on George Orwell's farmyard allegory, with the band casting people as pigs, dogs and sheep. It is the angriest Floyd record, and the one that sits between Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

What is in the box

The biggest edition collects the original 1977 mix and the 2018 remix, a rarities disc, and a live disc. The rarities include early rough mixes of "Dogs" and "Sheep", a studio jam, and "Young Nicholas Jon", a previously unreleased Roger Waters song.

The live disc is a recording of the band's 1977 show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, taken from a tape made in the crowd by a teenage fan, Reinhard Hohlwein. The deluxe version adds a 64-page hardback book with new sleeve notes by the author Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Hohlwein, and an excerpt from Audrey "Po" Powell's memoir about designing the sleeve at Hipgnosis.

Smaller editions exist too: a single LP of the original mix on orange and sandstone vinyl, and a double LP or two-CD set pairing the album with the rarities.

"Sheep" gets a shorter cut

To start the campaign, the band have released "Sheep (Original Radio Edit)", a version of the roughly ten-minute track cut to around four and a half minutes. It has never been commercially available before, and it drops the slow build to hit the song's driving core faster.

It is a quick way back into the album. More on the band is on their ADMC page.