Every PJ Harvey rollout is an event. The avant-blues-punk goddess has only released one studio album in the last decade, 2023's Grammy-nominated I Inside the Old Year Dying, based on an epic poem she wrote called Orlam, with the lyrics entirely sung in the obscure English dialect of Dorset.

Today she's released a new single entitled "Voyager," named as such because she sings it from the perspective of NASA's Voyager 2 probe, which was launched in 1977 and contained Carl Sagan's "Golden Record," which, according to Stereogum, was "an audio-visual disc designed to show some of the shining lights of Earthly culture to any alien civilizations who might intercept it."

According to Bandcamp, the song is the "striking first signal from PJ Harvey’s next artistic chapter." The physicist Brian Cox (not Logan Roy from Succession) asked her to write a tune for his Emergence lecture tour and she had already been working on this track to offer. Cox himself plays Juno synth bass on the song. Here's Harvey's own statement on "Voyager."

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."

Listen to the eerie, synth-and-strings-oriented tune and enjoy its equally sparse video below.