The rock group Pink Floyd announced on Saturday that it raised 600 thousand dollars for Ukraine thanks to the song Hey Hey Rise Up, which was released in April.

The funds collected by the legendary rock band will be donated to several Ukrainian charities.

In April, Pink Floyd released a new recorded single, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” and the vocalist was not David Gilmour, but a Ukrainian singer, whose a cappella vocals were set to music in an Instagram post taken on Sofia Square in Kyiv. legendary band.

The music for the new song was recorded on March 30 by Gilmour and Nick Mason, with bassist Guy Pratt and Nitin Soni on keyboards. Roger Waters, who left the group in the mid-1980s, did not participate.

“Hey Hey Rise Up” is “the first new original composition they have recorded together as a band since The Division Bell in 1994”.

The vocalist is Andrii Khorolskyi from the Ukrainian band BoomBox. His voice was taken from an Instagram video he posted shortly after the invasion began, in which he performs the World War I protest song “In the Meadow Red Viburnum,” which has returned to the spotlight in the context of the Russian invasion. of Ukraine. The last line of the song translates to “Hey, hey, get up and be happy.”

The band has been on hiatus since the late 1990s, although 2014 saw the release of an instrumental album, The Endless River.

Gilmour’s interest in bringing the group back into the spotlight is also personal: he has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

At the time of the release, Gilmour said that the purpose of the new Pink Floyd single was to “raise funds for humanitarian organizations and boost morale”.