Moby, the electronic artist known for his dark musical undertones and staunch advocacy of animal rights, has announced a new album in the form of an environmental manifesto.
Entitled “These Systems Are Failing,” the album to be released on October 14 will be the debut of his new act called Moby and the Void Pacific Choir.
Moby released an initial two tracks, which have echoes of the techno sound that made him famous in the 1990s but carry a forceful wall of guitar and bleak minor-key arrangements.
A video for the title track starts with Moby dragging a microphone stand through a parking lot and into nature before a rapid-paced tour of consumer culture.
The video races through a supermarket before showing piles of chicks being dumped to their deaths in an egg factory and a sneering Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate.
In a video manifesto to announce the album, Moby — appearing to be drowning in a pool to dark ambient music — questions the state of human civilisation.
“We’re still acting as our ancestors acted, grasping for food, destroying nature, killing animals, killing each other, maintaining systems that haven’t worked in a long time,” he says.
“These systems are killing us. These systems are killing everything. These systems are failing. Let them fail!”
Moby will release the album before Circle V, a new vegan music and food festival on October 23 that he has launched in Los Angeles, where the native New Yorker has relocated.
The festival will be the only 2016 performance by Moby, who earlier in the year wrote a well-received memoir, “Porcelain.”
Moby — who takes his stage name from “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville, a distant ancestor — started as a guitarist in the hardcore punk scene of the 1980s before finding his calling as a DJ.
While his lyricism is often minimal, Moby has routinely infused his views into his music, releasing essays with his albums to press for a vegan diet and to declare his belief in a tolerant form of Christianity.
