PJ Harvey is back with her first song since I Inside the Old Year Dying—a starbound synth odyssey called “Voyager.” At the request of the British physicist Brian Cox, Harvey developed the song from a draft for her next album, adopting the “voice” of the NASA probe Voyager 2 to match the theme of spaceman Cox’s Emergence tour. Harvey recorded the song with an orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence. Watch the video, directed by Cox and Nic Stacey, below.

Harvey said in a press release:

I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in 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. The song had already started life as part of the ongoing work towards my new album, so 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. With these ideas as my starting point I let the song develop, and discussed an orchestral accompaniment with Dario Marianelli. I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot’.

Read Ivy Nelson’s Sunday Review of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire?