Three years after the release of her Grammy-nominated album I Inside the Old Year Dying, PJ Harvey has offered the first glimpse of her next creative chapter with the release of the expansive new single, ‘Voyager’.
Stream ‘Voyager’ HERE.
Released via Partisan Records, the track began life as part of Harvey’s forthcoming studio album before taking on a new dimension when physicist Professor Brian Cox invited her to compose music for his Emergence live tour. Inspired by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and still transmitting data from interstellar space, ‘Voyager’ marries sweeping orchestral arrangements with pulsing electronic textures to contemplate humanity’s place in the vastness of the cosmos.
Recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence and featuring orchestration by Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli, the song is both intimate and immense. Drawing on Carl Sagan’s famous description of Earth as a “pale blue dot”, Harvey crafts a meditation on fragility, perspective and hope, finding quiet optimism amid the enormity of space.
“I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2,” Harvey explains. “I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could?”
She continues: “The song had already started life as part of the ongoing work towards my new album, so when Professor Brian Cox invited me to write a piece for his new show, I sent him the voice memo of this song to see if it resonated. It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth.”
The collaboration ultimately became something far larger than a commission. “I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music,” Harvey says. “I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot’.”
Across more than three decades, Harvey has consistently refused to repeat herself. From the visceral minimalism of Dry and Rid of Me to the literary ambition of Let England Shake and the atmospheric introspection of I Inside the Old Year Dying, she has remained one of the most adventurous figures in modern music. The only artist to win the Mercury Prize twice, Harvey has continually expanded the possibilities of alternative rock while maintaining an unmistakable artistic voice.
If ‘Voyager’ is any indication, her next album looks set to continue that restless creative evolution, reaching beyond earthly concerns to explore humanity’s smallest questions against the largest imaginable backdrop.
