Pet Shop Boys Release Alan Turing Album A Man from the Future

Pet Shop Boys have released their new album, A Man from the Future, an eight-part work about the life and death of the mathematician and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing. The album came out on Friday 9 October 2026 through Parlophone Records and the duo's own x2 label, and it is the band's sixteenth studio album.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe wrote the piece with Professor Andrew Hodges, the author of the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Each of the work's sections follows a significant chapter of Turing's life, from his childhood and school days through his work on wartime codebreaking and the development of the computer, to his prosecution for homosexuality and his death in 1954 at the age of 41.

The recording blends the band's electronic writing with orchestral music and spoken narration. Actress Juliet Stevenson narrates passages adapted from Hodges' biography, edited and extended by Tennant and Hodges. The Manchester Camerata Octet plays strings arranged by the German composer Sven Helbig, who also arranged the vocals, and singers from the Manchester Grammar School choir appear on four of the tracks. According to the band's release notes, the album was recorded in the United Kingdom and Germany over the past year and produced by Pet Shop Boys with Helbig.

From the Proms to the studio

The work is more than a decade old. Tennant, Lowe and Hodges first wrote it in 2012 and 2013, and it was performed publicly at the BBC Proms in July 2014 at the Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Concert Orchestra, the BBC Singers and narration from Stevenson. For the album, the band revised and rearranged both the text and the music, giving it, in their words, more of an electronic emphasis; Helbig reworked his orchestrations for the intimacy of a small string section.

The release was previewed on radio ahead of Friday. BBC Radio 6 Music aired the new recording on 4 October during Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, with Maconie speaking to Tennant, Lowe and Hodges, and BBC Radio 3 played it later the same evening on Unclassified, presented by Elizabeth Alker, with all three guests appearing again. Both broadcasts remain on BBC Sounds for thirty days. On 8 October, the trio appeared at Imperial War Museum North in Manchester for a listening event built around a full playback of the album, according to Side-Line.

A life in chapters

The track listing runs through the episodes that shaped Turing's reputation: childhood, his fascination with machines, the Enigma code, wartime service, memory and control, the trial, his death, and the closing title piece. The individual songs are "Natural wonders every child should know", "He dreamed of machines", "The Enigma", "Other ranks", "The memory and the control", "The trial", "Only in his death" and "A man from the future".

The title track reaches beyond biography into the record of official atonement. It includes an excerpt from a 2009 statement by the former prime minister Gordon Brown, who acknowledged Turing's achievements and apologised for the inhumane treatment he received. It then marks the posthumous royal pardon granted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts and given hormonal treatment as an alternative to prison; he died two years later. Reported by Hello Rayo, the album treats that history as inseparable from his scientific legacy: his leadership in breaking the Enigma cipher, his role in inventing the digital computer, and his early predictions about artificial intelligence.

What the duo said

In a statement released with the album, Tennant and Lowe said their motive in creating the work was to make a "musical memorial" to Turing, who "gave so much to his country and the world" and was "rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality". They credited him with a massive contribution to the defeat of Germany in the Second World War and called him a pioneer of computing who imagined "a world with intelligent computers". Turing, they said, also looked forward to a time "when being gay would be accepted as normal", and in both his professional and private life was "ahead of his time".

The album is available on vinyl, as a two-disc CD set and on Blu-ray audio. The Blu-ray edition carries the full sung-and-narrated version, an instrumental version and a version without narration, mixed in Dolby Atmos and high-resolution stereo.