Massive Attack have sent a song to the moon.
Last week, the Bristol trip-hop icons joined The Avalanches, Moses Boyd, Pussy Riot and a handful of other artists in launching their music into space for an art exhibition. Their contribution was a cover of Everything Is Going According To Plan, a 1988 song by Russian punks Grob, a snippet of which you can hear below.
The cosmic transmission was done as part of Art After Dark: Piccadilly Un:Plugged, an exhibition by the Piccadilly-based Art Of London gallery. The project sends music to the moon and back using “Earth–Moon–Earth” technology, with the signal being received by the Lovell Telescope in Cheshire.
According to the exhibition’s website, the returned recordings will have been altered to create “an otherworldly soundscape that connects Earth with the cosmos”.
Though Massive Attack’s Everything Is Going According To Plan cover hasn’t been released in its entirety, it’s the first new music the outfit have released since 2010 album Heligoland.
The duo of Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall said last year that they hope to release something in 2025, and Del Naja chalked the delay up to a “dispute at the [record] label”.
“Hopefully we’re going to be able to release it next year and do some gigs,” he said.
When asked how he feels about the new music, he elaborated: “Yeah, I hate sitting on stuff for too long because I’m the first person to get bored of it. I deliberately don’t play it for months so that I can maintain some enthusiasm for it.”
However, he finished, “It’s good – I’m looking forward to it!”
Massive Attack will play two UK shows in June: one at Manchester’s Co-Op Live arena on June 5 and another at LIDO festival in London’s Victoria Park on June 6. LIDO will be London’s first fully battery-powered festival.
