As someone thats worked around secret campaigns, etc for parts of my career (giant car launches, medium sized music label things, music vids, etc) I can say that if a label/company has some trust in, lets say, a handful of reliable record stores with decades of partnership/distro history, a label rep could easily email the store/manager something like "we have an idea and want to keep it totally secret from everyone, even your employees" and have a shipment mail out, have the mgmt pull out the secret stuff and put it aside until embargo / release day. It's essentially a more informal NDA, and honestly, it happens a lot.
It's how a lot of stuff gets made and "surprised" out into the world, like the printers of the posters, for instance. If you are a printer with a 20yr relationship with Warp, you are going to tell your people to keep a lid on it and do the service... And those have been printed for weeks, if not a month and no one knew until they were up on walls. Same with the people putting them up around the world. Not everything is cloak and dagger secret, sometimes it's a lot simpler and genuinely, when you work with the right people, they will indeed keep their mouths shut and it can move fast. I've asked some to do it myself, and I've had it done to me. All that being said, having something drop on RSD on a large scale is dreamin' y'all. It could be a select ltd thing, but as others have said, they would be repeating themselves a bit. It would be fun, but most likely it's a radio premiere in the coming days with a few social posts after with links to pre-sales, and/or video/streaming. I look forward to whatever it is though (and do fully hope its a few hex'flex discs with some wild code in a digital decryption language that takes us all 3wk to decode) but I'll be down at RSD to try to snag the AIR live album at least...
