PJ Harvey has gone intergalactic. The British music icon just dropped a haunting new single called "Voyager," imagining what NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft would say if it could speak.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is one of only two spacecraft to escape the sun's heliosphere and enter interstellar space. On the track, Harvey sings in the voice of the probe, layering her vocals with glitches to sound spectral and distant. She asks it to "look back at us as a speck of dirt" while pleading to "choose light, choose love."
"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?"
The production involves Harvey on percussion and a Prophet-5 synthesizer—the iconic synth beloved by Kraftwerk and John Carpenter. Physicist Brian Cox plays Juno synth bass on the track, while his son George Cox handles percussive bass. They recorded it in Provence with orchestral arrangements from composer Dario Marianelli and the Miraval Orchestra.
"Voyager" is featured in Brian Cox's Emergence world tour. A seven-inch vinyl is available for preorder.
Both Voyager 1 and 2 carry golden records—a Carl Sagan-designed time capsule meant to communicate Earth's history to any extraterrestrial life. With Harvey's haunting vocals, humanity's message to the cosmos now includes a song.
