PJ Harvey‘s last album found her singing about a fictionalized version of her home country. For her next project, she’s headed as far there as humanly (or inhumanly) possible.
On her somber new single, “Voyager,” she imagines what the voice of the Voyager 2, a space probe NASA launched in 1977, would say. “Force fields, high winds, cold moons, bright rings, hear my signal, will you follow?” she sings, her voice sounding spectral with glitches. “Look back at us as a speck of dirt.” Keyboards undulate between two notes, quivering like a fading signal, as she sings, “Choose light, choose love.” Strings swell around her as her voice lifts heavenward at the end. The song features in particle physicist and BBC personality Brian Cox‘s Emergence world tour. A seven-inch of the song is available for preorder.
“I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2,” Harvey said in a statement. “I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could? This was an inspiring route to take to develop the song.”
Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, are the only spacecrafts to exit the sun’s heliosphere, measuring “magnetic fields, particles, and plasma waves in interstellar space,” according to NASA. Voyager 2 passed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune before reaching interstellar space in 2018. Both Voyagers carry a “golden record,” a gold-plated copper LP designed by astronomer Carl Sagan that doubles as a time capsule to tell possible alien lifeforms the history of Earth, as well as recordings of music from all over the planet.
“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,” Harvey said. “It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth. With these ideas as my starting point I let the song develop, and I discussed an orchestral accompaniment with Dario Marianelli.”
On the song, Harvey plays percussion and a Prophet-5 synthesizer (a go-to instrument for everyone from Kraftwerk to John Carpenter), which includes drum programming from Damien Quintard and Marianelli’s arrangement, played by the Miraval Orchestra. Brian Cox plays a Juno synth bass on the song while his son, George Cox, plays percussive bass. They recorded the song in Provence this past February.
“I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music,” Harvey said. “I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 and 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’.”
Harvey teased her next project in a 2024 Rolling Stone interview, saying that she puts a lot of thought into what she wants to spend her time on. “As an artist, I sort of jump into something I’m really consumed by, and that becomes the theme for a number of years,” she said. “As you get older, and you see that there’s a finite amount of years left to do all the things you want to pursue… I choose what I want to get lost in for years at a time quite carefully now.”
