Voyager: Celestial Sound.
PJ Harvey Releases Orchestral 'Voyager,' Her First New Music Since 2023, Teasing New Album.
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Key Points
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Voyager was released on June 24, 2026, marking PJ Harvey’s first new music since 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying and issued on Partisan Records.
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The track arrives three years after the Grammy-nominated 2023 album I Inside the Old Year Dying and is described as a glimpse into her next artistic chapter.
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Harvey sent Brian Cox a voice memo of the song to test its resonance, which helped steer the piece toward the Voyager concept and its orchestral expansion.
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Brian Cox’s Emergence live tour will feature the track, with Harvey’s involvement spanning his stage show and imminent UK appearances later this year.
PJ Harvey released "Voyager" on June 24, 2026 — her first new music in three years — marking a dramatic shift from the folk-inflected sound of her last album toward a vast, orchestral space epic. Consequence reports the track is a "glimpse" into her next album, recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence, France, and issued on Partisan Records as a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl.
The song takes its name from NASA's twin Voyager probes, launched in 1977. Voyager 2 is now more than 12 billion miles from Earth. Harvey wrote the track in the "voice" of that probe, drawing on Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" reflection on humanity's fragile place in the universe, according to BrooklynVegan.
Brian Cox's Invitation Sparked the Orchestral Concept
Physicist and broadcaster Professor Brian Cox asked Harvey to contribute to his live science show, *Emergence*, in late 2025. Harvey sent Cox a voice memo of an early version of the song to test whether it resonated. It did. That exchange pushed the piece from a simple album sketch into a fully orchestrated work, according to Consequence.
Cox doesn't just appear in the credits — he plays Juno synth bass on the track, Stereogum reports. Harvey collaborated with Oscar-winning composer Dario Marianelli, who wrote the score for *Atonement*, to build the orchestral arrangements. The trio appeared together on the BBC's *The One Show* on March 10, 2026 to preview the project.
Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot Shapes Harvey's Lyric Frame
Harvey directly quotes Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" — his 1990 reflection on Earth as a tiny speck of light in a vast cosmos — in the song's lyric frame. Louder Than War notes that Harvey has a longstanding fascination with space, and the project deepens her recent turn toward ecological and environmental themes. The goal, she has said, was to write from inside Voyager 2's perspective.
BrooklynVegan ties the song's themes to the Voyager Golden Record — the phonograph disc NASA placed aboard both probes in 1977 to represent Earth's life and culture to any extraterrestrial life that might find them. Harvey has said the image of humanity sending that record into infinite space captures exactly the kind of fragile hope she wanted to write about.
Miraval Studios Recording Signals a Cinematic New Sound
Harvey recorded "Voyager" at Miraval Studios in Provence — the same studio where Pink Floyd and AC/DC have worked. Pitchfork describes the result as "celestial," with Stereogum calling it "cavernous" and "ethereal." The track blends modular synths with soft orchestral swells. Critics note it is a clear break from the "insular, scratchy" textures of her 2023 album *I Inside the Old Year Dying*.
Harvey's 2023 album earned a Grammy nomination and closed out with a world tour that ended in Japan and Australia in March 2025. By December 2025, she was already writing songs for the next record. Partisan Records is framing "Voyager" as the "first signal from PJ Harvey's next artistic chapter," with a full album expected in late 2026 or early 2027, per BrooklynVegan.
Emergence Tour Will Bring Voyager to Hundreds of Thousands Live
"Voyager" will serve as a centerpiece of Cox's *Emergence* live tour, which includes UK dates later in 2026. Cox's previous tour, *Horizons*, reached nearly 500,000 people globally. *Emergence* is expected to match or exceed that scale. Stereoboard notes that Harvey's involvement spans both the recorded track and live performance within the show.
The partnership points to a broader trend: science communicators pairing with major artists to create immersive live experiences. For Harvey, it also opens her work to audiences who may never have heard *Rid of Me* or *Let England Shake*. Louder Than War calls it a natural extension of the science-inspired storytelling she has been quietly building toward for years.
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