The Race for Space by Public Service Broadcasting

The Race for Space, the second album from Public Service Broadcasting, landed on 23 February 2015 and turned the superpowers' most photogenic contest into a record you can nod your head to. J. Willgoose, Esq. and Wrigglesworth built it from archive sound supplied by the British Film Institute, laying old voices over guitars, banjo, drums and electronics to replay the American and Soviet scramble for the heavens, 1957 to 1972. It opens with John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice University in 1962, and "Go!" surges like an engine at full burn. The fourth track, "Fire in the Cockpit", is heavy enough in subject that the band held off on playing the album start to finish live until 2016.

They launched it with two nights at the National Space Centre in Leicester, and it reached 11 in the UK while topping the indie albums chart. For the Apollo landing's fiftieth anniversary in 2019, they played it in a new orchestral arrangement at the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.