R.E.M. are celebrating the 40th anniversary of their debut EP Chronic Town. For the first time ever, the critically-acclaimed, five-song EP will be released as a CD with extensive liner notes by Mitch Easter, who produced it. It’ll be available also on picture disc and cassette on August 19 via I.R.S./UMe.
Last year, Michael Stipe directly addressed rumors that R.E.M. might be getting back together. An interview brought up a Rolling Stone piece that gave the chance of their reunion a 30% chance, but Stipe said, “That’s wishful thinking,” he began. “We will never reunite. We decided when we split up that that would just be really tacky and probably money-grabbing, which might be the impetus for a lot of bands to get back together.”
They also unveiled the Hib-Tone version of “Sitting Still,” the B-side to the band’s 1983 debut single “Radio Free Europe,” last year. “We were all just kind of finger-painting,” Mitch Easter, who produced “Radio Free Europe,” told Rolling Stone in May. “They weren’t super-deliberate about anything. I loved that about the sessions. Even when we did the LPs, nobody was really taking any orders from anybody. There might have been people advising R.E.M. on the business end of things, to do this, that, or the other. But they pretty much ignored all of them.”
Listen to the EP’s first track “Wolves, Lower” above.