I feel like I’ve been living inside the second album from Public Service Broadcasting, The Race for Space, for years, so I’m glad the band finally recorded it.

Instrumental music applied to archival radio news reports from the era make for something glorious and epic (despite a relatively brief 48-minute running time). It’s the age of Sputnik and Apollo convincingly and beautifully re-awakened by two musicians who weren’t even alive at the time of the moon landing. An oddity, perhaps, but one with a wide embrace. From Richard Hollingham at the BBC:

We are all familiar with the visual icons of the space race – such as Gagarin being lauded in Red Square the Earthrise picture from Apollo 8 or the American flag on the lunar surface – but, for Willgoose, audio has proved just as emotive.

“Radio has the best pictures, there’s a certain amount of imagination that this music calls upon,” he says. “Our live shows are so video-heavy and we get a lot of presumptions that the music is totally reliant on the images but I think it’s the other way round.”•