Our album, Wild Light, is released in the UK and Europe on Monday 16th September through Superball Music. It will follow in the U.S on 29th October, and is also coming imminently to Australia via Bird’s Robe Records and Japan via Zankyo.

Of course we all know that, if you look in the right places, it’s also available entirely for free on the torrent sites and will be forever more.

65daysofstatic had wanted to put out a torrent release ourselves on the day of the official release. Somebody is going to whether we like it or not, and we believe that rather than putting our heads in the sand and pretending it isn’t happening, by proactively seeding the torrent on release day (especially after having managed to avoid the record leaking), we could control the things bundled with it, and allow people to support us in other ways. We could include ticket links, info on the vinyl version…A donate button, maybe? A message to people torrenting it explaining that as much as 65 believe the current model of music ‘consumption’ is hopelessly outdated and fundamentally broken, we are stuck inside it nevertheless; even just buying a t-shirt from our online store makes a real, tangible difference.

All of the above sounds better than a bunch of mistagged, badly compressed mp3s zipped up alongside a dodgy .nfo file with bad ascii art, leading you to a sketchy Russian malware site on the promise of more free music, right?

We haven’t done it, though and we won’t. We have a resolutely old school record deal and, perhaps unusually, we actually like the labels we work with (all small indies, obviously), and so out of respect to them, we decided to just post this message instead. (To be fair, we have an ulterior motive, which is that we want to share this record with as many people as possible and the means by which they hear it is less important to us than knowing that they’ve listened. The labels can’t afford to share that perspective).

One good thing about torrents is that they still preserve the idea of an ‘album’ as a collection of songs, as a cohesive ‘whole’. Even if it’s a collection of mp3 files rather than anything physical, they at least come bundled together with a tracklisting, artwork, a sense that this is ‘something’. Streaming services, in comparison, remove even these fine threads from making music something you might want to own. The songs become just more digital froth spilling out of your computer, along with videos of cats and Facebook notification pings.

Anyway. We didn’t do it. I suppose we could have done it secretly, but that would have missed the point. But. If you are the kind of person that seeds music on torrents and intend to host our new record, it would be great if you could also include links to our live shows page, our online store where people can buy physical copies of the record should they like it, and perhaps also a link to this blog post you’re reading right now.

If you’re a leecher and you intend to download our record from a torrent site, then we hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please consider coming to one of our shows, or buying a t-shirt or something, if paying for the music itself feels weird or old-fashioned.

Most of all though, if you like our band, please share that info with as many people as you can, however you feel sharing works best. The reason 65 has survived so long outside of most of the music industry as you know it is through the word of mouth of people like you.