Pioneer 11 is the brainchild of Bryan Gomez and Alex Hastings, a shapeshifting musical project searching for the future of contemporary psychedelia. Named after NASA’s 1973 robotic space probe, Pioneer 11 and their collaborators transmit hybrids of electronica, dance, and psych-rock from uncharted sonic coordinates. While their work could fit alongside group influences like Caribou, Darkside, and Four Tet, Pioneer 11 have channeled their inspirations into a wholly singular sound and ethos. Cosmic outlaws and musical outliers, they reject tie-dyed nostalgia and remain rooted in the uncomfortable digital present — chronicling how technology continually warps society while forecasting our frightening future.

Humanoid is Pioneer 11’s latest evolution, a genre-dismantling album of neo-psychedelia that fuses house, electronica, and hazy guitar riffs. Raging against the techno-dystopian machine, Humanoid is the soundtrack to a desert rave devoid of data-mining corporate sponsors, a high-BPM ride down a cyberpunk Shakedown Street of mind-expanding substances and sounds. Hastings and Gomez co-wrote the songs that Gomez sings in his arresting falsetto, all of which cast a satirical and wary lens on the metaverse, internet-fueled delusions, and technological dependence. Perhaps the closest anyone has come to a Philip K. Dick-inspired dance album, Humanoid is where pensive and sometimes paranoid lyrics shine through pounding percussion, deep bass grooves, and shimmering synths. You can meditate on tech-induced nightmares or dance away the dread.

While Gomez and Hastings are the backbones of these stadium-ready amalgams of analog and digital instrumentation, electronic musiciain Joey Kehoe became the group’s third member and the missing link. He contributed drums and synths while co-writing half a dozen songs on the album including album single “Destiny,” which sounds like Daft Punk on DMT creating unearthly acts of levitation, wounded automaton soul, and deep neon grooves. The trio also brought Darkside’s Dave Harrington into their orbit. Harrington provides ethereal guitar and electronics on album opener “Hero of Modernity” and also co-produced and mixed the track. Pioneer 11’s remix of the Dave Harrington Group’s “Belgrade Fever” hit over six-figure Spotify streams without editorial playlisting. Playlist or not, the rest of Humanoid — from the propulsive serotonin-boosting grooves of “Brain Dead,” which KCRW’s Travis Holcombe kept in heavy rotation throughout 2022, to the thumping desert fever dream of “Time Crimes” — will soon reach countless listeners. Humanoid is too musically progressive, lyrically prescient, and viscerally danceable to be ignored.