earMUSICDeep Purple has released a second single in advance of their forthcoming studio album, Whoosh!, an atmospheric, prog-rock-flavored tune titled “Man Alive.”
The song, which is available now as a digital download and via streaming services, finds lead singer Ian Gillan singing about an ominous post-apocalyptic scenario where mankind has become extinct because of how we treated the planet.
“It’s an abstract concept,” Gillan tells Billboard. “There was an apocalyptic quality to the [music of] ‘Man Alive,’ and the idea developed lyrically from there — the scenario of this event that took place and everyone got killed, and you get this picture of ‘all creatures great and small grazed on blood red soil, and grass that grows on city streets.'”
“Man Alive” also includes spoken-word segments, marking a first for Gillan in his long tenure with Deep Purple.
A companion video for “Man Alive” also premiered today at the earMUSIC label’s YouTube channel. It begins by showing various beautiful landscapes on Earth, then switches to showing cosmic images before switching again to displaying scenes of pollution on our planet, including smokestacks, garbage dumps and junkyards. The clip also features an appearance by a man in a spacesuit, like the one on the cover of Whoosh! and that appeared in the video for the album’s recently released first single, “Throw My Bones.”
Whoosh! is scheduled to be released August 7 in a variety of formats and configurations, including as a standard CD, as a two-LP set, digitally and as a limited-edition box set featuring a DVD with bonus content.
In other news, Gillan tells Billboard that, after launching what they’d considered to be an extended farewell trek in 2017 dubbed The Long Goodbye Tour, Deep Purple no longer has definite plans to retire.
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