PJ Harvey returns with surprise, meditative new single “Voyager”
PJ Harvey returns with new single “Voyager,” a track thats sounds like a transmission from the edge of the known universe. Released today via Partisan Records, the song is her first new music since the Grammy-nominated I Inside the Old Year Dying and it offers an early glimpse into an as-yet-untitled forthcoming album already being described as the next chapter in her ever-restless artistic evolution.
Written partly for physicist Brian Cox’s Emergence tour, “Voyager” imagines the voice of NASA’s Voyager 2 probe drifting through interstellar darkness. Harvey has said she was fascinated by the challenge of writing from the spacecraft’s perspective, drawing inspiration from its decades-long journey and Carl Sagan’s famous “pale blue dot” meditation on humanity’s fragility.
Recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence and featuring orchestral arrangements developed with Oscar-winning composer Dario Marianelli, the track unfolds with patience, it’s contemplative and balances the, cosmic scale of its journey against a much more intimate human longing.
The music is lush, with a dreamlike atmosphere and a widescreen cinematic sweep. It expands on the spectral folk textures of I Inside the Old Year Dying into something grand and celestial. If “Voyager” is a signpost toward Harvey’s eleventh studio album, then the destination promises to be extraordinary.
