The Pope Is Finally Releasing That Pop-Rock Album We’ve All Been Waiting For

Following on from his South America trip, Pope Francis is now currently touring the United States for the first time, and if the thousands of people filling up the streets with cardboard cutouts of him are anything to go by, he’s been getting a real rockstar welcome. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church and regular Cool Guy has been getting props from progressive believers — and non-believers — recently for his advocacy of action on climate change and supportive and inclusive stance on the LGBT community — convictions that distinctly set him aside from previous popes.

But his rockstar status has a musical link now, because the Pope is about to release an album. Yep, Pope Francis = the next king of rock. According to Rolling Stone, the Vatican-blessed progressive-rock LP titled Wake Up! is a collaboration with Believe Digital, and features the best of the Pope reciting hymns and speeches fused with uplifting, atmospheric melodies. There are 11 tracks on the record, and the Pontiff, being the inclusive good guy he is, speaks in Italian, English, Spanish and Portuguese about a whole range of nice things (mostly peace).

The first track to be premiered is ‘Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!’ (!?), and includes Pope Francis’ speech to a South Korean audience last year, while a post-rock mini-symphony and electric guitar shreds alongside it. As the song name suggests, the papal debut is about metaphorically ‘waking up’ to god, your life’s purpose, etc, etc, etc. “No one who sleeps can sing, dance and rejoice,” Francis says on the track. Gotta admit — he’s got you there.

Wake Up! drops on November 27th, but a downloadable version of the hottest single of 2015 ‘Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!’ is already available on SoundCloud, where it has attracted over 300,000 listens and encouraging comments like “jawdropping”, “wtf” and “Christianity is cool again!”.

No word yet on whether the Catholic boss will collab with Arcade Fire next, or when and where he’ll live-tour the LP, but here’s to watching him slay all your favourites in the charts and dominate the top spot for all of eternity.

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Story via Rolling Stone.

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Feature image via a Creative Commons licence/Jeon Han.