PJ Harvey – Voyager
PJ Harvey has released “Voyager”, her first new song since 2023’s I Inside The Old Year Dying, out now on Partisan Records with a 7-inch pressing available to pre-order. It’s connected to work already underway on her next album, though nothing’s been confirmed yet about that record’s title or release date.
The song is written from the perspective of Voyager 2, the NASA probe launched in 1977 that’s still transmitting from interstellar space nearly fifty years later. Harvey’s said she’d long been fascinated by the spacecraft and wanted to imagine what it might say if it could speak: synthesizers and orchestral strings build a sound that’s cold and weightless. She’s worked the Carl Sagan “pale blue dot” image into the song’s perspective, that sense of Earth as something impossibly small and fragile when seen from far enough away.
The connection to NASA’s actual mission came almost accidentally. Harvey had already been developing the track for her album when physicist Brian Cox asked her to contribute something to his “Emergence” tour; she sent him a voice memo of the unfinished song, and the Voyager probe’s radio signal was the first thing it brought to his mind. From there she developed the idea further and brought in film composer Dario Marianelli for the orchestral arrangement, recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence. One outlet reported that Cox himself plays Juno synth bass on the track, though that detail hasn’t been corroborated elsewhere.
The video, four minutes of abstract space imagery, archival mission footage, and a closing shot of the sun emerging from behind the Earth, matches the song’s quiet, drifting pace without ever rushing toward a bigger moment.
