Pet Shop Boys cast Turing's life in eight new tracks

Out on 9 October through Parlophone, the revised Proms work arrives with strings from the Manchester Camerata Octet, boys from Manchester Grammar School choir and narration by Juliet Stevenson using text from Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Pet Shop Boys release their studio album, A Man From The Future, on 9 October through Parlophone. The eight-track concept album explores the life, work and legacy of Alan Turing in collaboration with biographer Andrew Hodges. Narration drawn from his book Alan Turing: The Enigma is spoken by Juliet Stevenson.

String arrangements by Sven Helbig are performed by the Manchester Camerata Octet, and boys from Manchester Grammar School choir appear on four of the tracks. The record arrives on vinyl, CD and digital, with a Blu-ray audio edition carrying Dolby Atmos mixes and instrumental versions.

From the Proms to the studio

The work was originally performed at the BBC Proms in 2014. For this release, the duo have revised it with a greater electronic emphasis and new arrangements, pulling the Turing narrative closer to the sound Pet Shop Boys have built across more than four decades.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe formed the duo in London in 1981, Tennant as primary vocalist and Lowe on keyboards. They have sold more than 50 million records worldwide and were listed as the most successful duo in UK music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records. The early studio run — Please in 1986, Actually in 1987, Introspective and Behaviour — fixed a standard for British synth-pop that the pair have kept refining through albums, remix projects and live documents.

Later decades brought further studio sets and a reputation for careful craft, with writing, production and presentation treated as a single discipline. Their most recent studio album, Nonetheless, came out in 2024, the same year as a cluster of EPs including Dancing star, Feel and Furthermore. In 2026 they issued the live set Dreamworld - The Greatest Hits Live. Against that sequence, A Man From The Future stands as a narrative suite rather than a conventional pop long-player: eight tracks bound to a single historical figure, yet still grounded in the electronic craft that has always been their centre.

What arrives with the record

On 8 October a listening party and conversation with the band and Hodges takes place at Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, the day before the physical and digital release.

Hodges's biography has long been the principal account of Turing's work on computation and wartime codebreaking. Setting that text against Stevenson's delivery, Helbig's strings and the Manchester Grammar School choir turns a public life into a continuous musical argument. The electronic revision of the 2014 Proms score is the bridge between the concert hall and the duo's own catalogue — a concept album that treats Turing not as a distant subject but as material for the studio.

Concept work of this kind sits apart from the run of singles and albums that made Tennant and Lowe a fixture of British pop, yet it still speaks in their established voice: spare, precise and electronic at the core. It will be released in those formats. Further details of the Manchester event sit with the venue and the band's channels; the record itself lands on 9 October.