Normally, viruses approach people.  Instead, Calle 13 proposes for its audience to approach the virus. That is why on November 5th the band announced that in a few days their fans would be able to hear their new single, after almost four years of not releasing new music.  "Multi_Viral" is the first single off their fifth studio album to be released in 2014.  Today, November 13th starting at 7am AST (Puerto Rico time), Calle 13 premiered the song, which can be listened to via several online platforms.  "Multi_Viral" will also be spread virally through their social networking profiles.

The song features the participation of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who is a renowned activist and accused of being a hacker and leaking classified information. In addition, it includes collaborations with Tom Morello, deemed by RollingStone magazine as one of the best guitarists of all time, as well as Palestinian singer-songwriter and musician Kamilya Jubran.  This diversity is what makes it impossible to pigeonhole Calle 13 into a particular genre of music. The same can be said for "Multi_Viral", it's a song that belongs to many genres. Through the music and lyrics, fans can identify with particular elements of the song and develop a personal relationship to it.

The concept of the song emerged last June when Residente met with Julian Assange at the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Through a Twitcam they proposed to their fans on Twitter to write the song together. That very day, they received thousands of emails from which they selected words and phrases, which began to fuel the creative process.  As Residente describes it, "It was like a puzzle... similar to what happens when one writes, you have all the words in your head and you build what you want, but this time I was actually seeing the words".

Just shy of a week ago, Calle 13 surprised the media with a message that appeared to be encoded.  To a certain extent it was intended to see how much they [Calle 13] could manipulate information and the effect that this could have on the dissemination of the message.  Surprisingly, many did not realize how evident the message was, as simple as reading a sentence in yellow font which was hidden amongst the other words written in green font: 13-11-13 [Calle 13] Residente and Visitante [Multi_:{] Viral].

Against censorship, media manipulation and the concealment of information.