Pet Shop Boys honour Turing with October album

Pet Shop Boys announced on 4 September 2026 the forthcoming release of *A Man From The Future*, a conceptual album built around eight significant chapters in the life and death of the pioneering mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. The record arrives on 9 October 2026 via Parlophone Records and is offered on vinyl, CD, Blu-ray audio and digital formats; pre-orders are already open.

The work was created in collaboration with Turing biographer Andrew Hodges. It features Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe alongside the Manchester Camerata Octet, with narration by Juliet Stevenson and string arrangements by Sven Helbig. Pet Shop Boys and Helbig produce the finished set. First heard at the BBC Proms in 2014, the piece has been revised and updated for this 2026 studio recording.

The eight tracks run in sequence: ‘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’. Pet Shop Boys described the project as “a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality”.

A career built on scale and story

Tennant and Lowe formed Pet Shop Boys in London in 1981. Tennant is the primary vocalist and Lowe the keyboardist; 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 catalogue that followed runs from the breakthrough of *Please* in 1986 and *Actually* in 1987 through *Introspective*, *Behaviour* in 1990 and a long sequence of albums, EPs and live documents. As recently as 2024, they issued *Nonetheless* and its expanded edition, together with a run of EPs that year; 2026 has already brought the live set *Dreamworld – The Greatest Hits Live*. *A Man From The Future* sits apart from the hit-single machine as a full-scale narrative work, yet it continues a career-long engagement with character, history, theatre and large-scale arrangement.

That instinct for the staged and the documented makes the Turing project a natural extension rather than a sudden detour. Hodges’s biography supplies the historical spine; Helbig’s strings and the Camerata Octet give the music a chamber weight the duo have often sought when stepping outside pure synth-pop; Stevenson’s narration anchors the eight chapters as spoken testimony as much as song. The result is presented not as a conventional studio album of singles but as a completed memorial piece, revised a dozen years after its first public airing.

Manchester, then the broadcast

A special listening and conversation event with Pet Shop Boys and Andrew Hodges takes place on 8 October at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. The evening offers full-album playback followed by discussion. Tickets go on sale on 7 September 2026 at 10am BST.

The release date is set, the formats are fixed, and the Manchester night now frames the fortnight before the record arrives. No further tour or additional live presentations have been announced in connection with the release.

For an act whose public life has always balanced chart discipline with formal ambition, the Turing album underlines how far that second strand still reaches.