M.I.A. announces album release date days after threatening to leak it

It looks like M.I.A. won’t be leaking her album after all. Days after the politically charged electro-pop rapper vented her frustrations about the status of the project, she finally unveiled release details Thursday.

Titled “AIM,” the album is set for a Sept. 9 release.

The album will be preceded by a new single, “Go Off,” which will be released Friday. Skrillex is featured on the track.

To announce the album, the British-born, Sri Lankan-bred artist posted a piece written by author Sinthujan Varatharajah on her website.

In the piece, Varatharajah writes about the plight of asylum seekers around the globe. He previously penned an essay on the politics of M.I.A.’s “Borders” video.

“Survivors of war, conflict and genocide live on as IDPs [internally displaced persons] and refugees, dispersed across their homelands and the globe. They embody the violence that has displaced them into the unknown, into uncertainty and into camps and council estates,” Varatharajah wrote. “Survivors crossed countless continents, countries and borders, leaving behind their homes, lives and dead: only to be rendered invisible, silent and forgotten in exile; only to be told that their bodies might have travelled but their stories have not.”

Varatharajah’s text, titled “M.I.A. // A.I.M.,” concluded with the confirmation of the single and the album’s release date.

Earlier this week M.I.A. said she was “on the verge” of leaking the new album.

“I hate it when big American artists take from me and my work and refugee sentiments from my work before it’s released,” she tweeted.

It was unclear whom she was accusing of biting her work, but she followed up that tweet with one saying she wanted to leak the record “especially when I get told to ‘Fight ur own battle.’”

The missive wasn’t the first time she threatened to release the album, the follow-up to 2013’s “Matangi,” on her own terms.

In a Periscope session where she previewed new music earlier this year, she told fans that she wakes up every day with the thought of leaking the album, but, wanting the support of her American label, Interscope, has prevented her from doing it.

“If I carry on making music, then I would do that, but I also want to find an album where I can actually make my label work for me,” she said at the time.

Over the past few months she’s released a handful of records including “MIA OLA” and “Foreign Friend,” that dealt with issues of immigration, and “Rewear It” as part of a clothes recycling campaign with H&M.

She also released “Poc That Still a Ryda,” a track that mixed together numerous songs from the album. Her label quickly yanked it off the Internet.

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