Orbital announce new album 30 Something with Stephen Hawking collaboration – watch here

New album set to drop in July

Orbital have today announced details of their upcoming new album 30 Something and released new single ‘Where Is It Going’ featuring Stephen Hawking.

Out July 15, on double CD, quadruple LP boxset and digital formats, 30 Something is a musical celebration of the pioneering career of the hugely influential electronic music duo comprised of brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll. The pandemic meant that Orbital missed their actual thirtieth anniversary, but it gave Paul and Phil pause to think and find a way to celebrate their past that was actually about the future. Unlike other Best Of’s, the ‘30 Something’ contains reworks, remakes, remixes and re-imaginings of landmark Orbital tracks based on the duo’s unrivalled live show. ‘Chime’, ‘Satan’, ‘The Box’, ‘Impact’, ‘Halcyon’, and more appear in new ‘30 Something’ guises, familiar yet new, time reversing, yesterday becoming tomorrow. The album involves Orbital-inspired artists and DJs, including Joris Voorn, Dusky, Jon Tejada, Yotto, and long-time supporter David Holmes, who reworks ‘Belfast’, the iconic track that got its name in his hometown.

‘Where Is It Going’, featuring Stephen Hawking, is a new mix of their collaboration with the late theoretical physicist from the 2012 London Paralympics Opening Ceremony. The ceremony’s organisers had asked Orbital for music to accompany a section in which Hawking, who passed away in 2018, would celebrate the Large Hadron Collider.

Watched by 11 million people in the UK alone, the performance brought many of the themes that have sustained Orbital over the years: the euphoria of discovery and the love of scientific method, faith in the future and the human mind, the notion that hedonism and progress are two sides of the same coin, always driving one another.

“This is our special Paralympic version of ‘Where Is It Going?’, featuring the fantastic Stephen Hawking. He’s tackling the big question of the unification of physics and the understanding of a theory of everything. We’re not there yet, we can’t even find a unification socially as a species but hopefully one day we will find out where we are going…”  – Orbital

30 Something is released on July 15 via Orbital Recordings. Check the Orbital artist page for pre-order news….