PJ Harvey drops expansive new track ‘Voyager’

Three years on from her last album - the Grammy-nominated ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ - PJ Harvey has offered up a celestial new effort entitled ‘Voyager’, a characteristically exploratory preview of her next record.

Taking its name from the NASA probes which have been travelling through space for nearly 50 years (having been launched back in 1977), ‘Voyager’ is a zero-gravity soundscape of swelling strings and synth pulses, combining organic warmth with cool detachment to evoke the fragile yet beautiful place of humanity amidst the stars.

Harvey had already started writing ‘Voyager’ when famous physicist Professor Brian Cox asked her to pen something for his ‘Emergence’ tour - a challenge she gladly accepted, considering how she could evoke the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2. “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,” she notes.

Confirming that ‘Voyager’ will appear on her as-yet-unannounced new album, Harvey has also explained: “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.”

Revisit our review of ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ and watch the official video for ‘Voyager’ below.