Public Service Broadcasting to release The Last Flight

Public Service Broadcasting announce their fifth studio album The Last Flight which will be released on 4 October via their new label So Recordings. The Last Flight was recorded at the band's studio in south-east London. Guests on The Last Flight include Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket, Berlin voices Andreya Casablanca and EERA, and Kate Stables of This Is The Kit. The new single Electra is out now.

The Last Flight concerns the final voyage of America’s pioneering female “aviatrix” Amelia Earhart. In 1937 she announced that she would circumnavigate the globe in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra aircraft. She crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She left Papua New Guinea to fly to Howland Island in the Central Pacific but never made it, instead ascending to the level of myth reserved for the bravest adventurers.

The album is similarly full of life-force, evoking adventure, speed and freedom as well as the psychological depths of a unique and admirable individual. The album does not feature original first-person testimony, but dialogue newly recorded by actors, including Kate Graham who read Amelia. This was then sensitively manipulated to give thirties sonic characteristics and distortion.

About the album J. Willgoose Esq. said: “I wanted to do a woman-focused story, because most of the archive we have access to is overwhelmingly male. I was initially drawn in by Earhart’s final flight, rather than the successes that she had, but the more I read the more I became fascinated by her. The final flight is the spine of the journey: the story jumps off at different points, and examines different facets of her personality, her relationship with her husband, her attitude to flying, her attitude to existing. She gave herself, I think, less than a 50% chance of survival when she flew the Atlantic alone. To put yourself, willingly, in those situations... I think it says something about that drive at the heart of humanity.” However, The Last Flight isn’t doom-laden or covered in grief. There’s adventure, freedom and the joy of being alive on it too.

Since 2009, Public Service Broadcasting has been releasing their stirring archival narratives for cinematic rock, electronics and orchestra, led by instrumentalist-auteur J. Willgoose, Esq., these masters of conceptual pop historiography have depicted humankind scaling Everest and confronting Nazism on 2013’s Inform-Educate-Entertain, and launching into the cosmos on The Race For Space in 2015. 2017’s Every Valley then examined societal struggle via Britain’s coal industry, while 2021’s Bright Magic was a dizzying portrait of Euro-metropolis Berlin.

The first single of the new album is Electra, a song full of soaring machine-funk and an ode to Earhart's plane. "The song is about Amelia Earhart's plane, the marvellously named Electra. To match the name, the vibrancy and the excitement of the aircraft, the track is full of pulsing electronics and interlocking, percussive melody lines, plus pace." - said J. Willgoose Esq. Watch the video below.

In November the band will come to Europe for shows:

10 Nov - Melkweg, Amsterdam

11 Nov - Ancienne Belgique, Brussels [sold out]

13 Nov - Vera, Groningen