Photo of Pet Shop Boys by Eva Pentel
Over the course of Pet Shop Boys’ now 40-year career, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have fluctuated between the touchstones of their music, crafting records that are variously pure synth-pop, club-centric bangers, or moody, thoughtful reflections. As they’ve grown, and aged, they have branched out into writing scores that deftly merge electronic sounds with orchestration. Pet Shop Boys’ previous LP, 2024’s Nonetheless, a smart and tuneful mix of dancefloor ready sounds and irony-laced pop, was their most focused in a decade. It also seemed like the type of success that they’ve often followed with a purposeful left turn. That suspicion was confirmed upon the release of their latest album, A Man from the Future.
A Man from the Future traces the life and legacy of British mathematician Alan Turing: a pioneering father of modern computing, for whom the famous Turing Test of machine intelligence is named; a hero who helped create electro-mechanical methods to methodically decrypt the German military’s Enigma machine during World War II; a man in search of the truth of the scientific beauty of the natural world; and a gay man who was ultimately persecuted, criminalized, and chemically castrated by the government that he worked tirelessly for, simply for being queer.
Created in collaboration with Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, Tennant and Lowe’s song cycle sets spoken word segments drawn from Hodges’ book to electro-symphonic compositions that evoke Turing’s fascination with the mathematical underpinnings of the world, and the natural law he sought to understand and uncover through systematic means.
A Man from the Future is a musical documentary of sorts—but instead of being a one-time fascination, it has the depth to continuously inform and enrich. Its ability to tell an artful story while staying musically engrossing is reminiscent of fellow Brits Public Service Announcement’s knack for combining archival recordings with dynamic music to tell a compelling non-fiction story. Tennant and Lowe’s sonic approach is both tender and unflinching, reflecting Turing’s inner world, dreams, and desires, and the social realities he worked within, and that tragically worked against him. Pet Shop Boys’ synthesizer sonatas are reinforced with weeping, piercing string arrangements by Sven Helbig that are brought to life by the Manchester Camerata Octet. The Manchester Grammar School Choir adds a wistful heft to Tennant’s vocals and to the narration of Hodges’ words, brought to life by actress Juliet Stevenson.
The stately piano chords, dramatic strings, and sonar-ping keyboards of “Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know” illuminate Turing’s academic, scientific, and sexual awakenings. “He Dreamed of Machines” pulses with percolating keyboards that put the listener inside the daydreams and brainstorms that forged Turing’s ideas. Meanwhile, the scintillating “The Enigma” (the closest thing the album offers in terms of a “traditional” Pet Shop Boys song) and its fat, surging beats, crystalline synths, and soaring strings brings to life Turing’s efforts to turn his ideas into practical machines that could help the British military turn the tide of the war. The poignant “Only in His Death” charts the details of the end of Turing’s life via icy, yet emotional, ambient electronica, reminiscent of both Future Sound of London’s shapeshifting 1990s records and Daniel Lopatin’s modern work as Oneohtrix Point Never.
Turing and his work anticipated a world filled with intelligent machines. He also eagerly awaited a time when being gay would be accepted as a normal part of nature’s creation. While his death by poison in 1954 (officially deemed suicide, but disputed to this day) meant he never lived to see the progress made towards the world he envisioned and craved, he was eventually vindicated. The merits of a reality where artificial intelligence is commonplace are hotly debated, but there is little doubt that it would not exist without Turing. He also never lived to see the UK government’s official apology for his treatment (then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 2009 statement is sampled in the cinematic title track, which features some excellent Chris Lowe sequencer rhythms), or the 2017 law named after him that retroactively pardoned men prosecuted during the time when homosexuality was criminalized in Britain. With A Man from the Future, Pet Shop Boys and Andrew Hodges are not merely promoting Turing’s legacy—they’re celebrating his life, contributions, and point of view via the analog and synthetic threads that ran concurrently through his life. | Mike Rengel
