The Moonlandingz are back with ‘No Rocket Required’ – and they’re bringing Iggy Pop with them

After seven long, weird, Moonlandingz-less years, the gloriously unhinged gang—Adrian Flanagan, Dean Honer, and Lias Saoudi—are back this Friday, April 25, with a brand new album, ‘No Rocket Required,’ via Transgressive Records. Yes, it’s been a minute. Yes, we missed them. And yes, they’ve returned exactly when we needed them most.

You might’ve already caught early tasters like The Sign of A Man and the shapeshifting Nadine Shah feature Roustabout, but they’ve just dropped one more teaser before the full album lands. Say hello to It’s Where I’m From, a track with a story that’s almost too wild to believe.

This song was born 15 years ago, after Flanagan shattered both arms in a nasty bike crash. Told he might never regain full use of them, he grabbed a handful of Morphine and crawled into his home studio, where—armed with just a mellotron, a MIDI keyboard, a drum machine, one finger and a thumb—he began writing music again. Defiant, raw, and dreamlike.

“It was the first song I wrote after my accident,” says Flanagan. “It’s like Johnny Cash doing ‘Hurt’ while channeling Scott Walker’s Scott 2. It just grounds you.” Lost in time, the demo ended up buried at the back of a cupboard. But during the final days of ‘No Rocket Required’ recording, he unearthed the CD again—full of forgotten, beautiful songs.

Cue resurrection. Flanagan brought in Oliver Harrap on drums, Alex White on sax and flute, and laid down a fresh vocal. But he had one voice in mind to fully bring it to life: Iggy Pop.

Not just a legend, but the voice to sing about mortality and loss. “No sweaty young upstart could make you believe this song,” Flanagan says. “It had to be Iggy. And by some psychic twist of fate, he said yes.”

Proof that even the most painful moments—stuffed in dusty boxes, nearly forgotten—can rise again and become something legendary.

The music video, crafted by longtime collaborator Jeanie Crystal, is the third piece in a trilogy exploring masculinity, sexuality, ego, and the messy, absurd effort to understand what it means to be “a man.” It’s moody, surreal, and beautifully bonkers—just like The Moonlandingz themselves.

So, here we are: the return of The Moonlandingz, the semi-fictional space cadets who first landed in the chaos of Brexit and Trump, offering up squelchy synth-pop salvation. Back then, they made an instant classic with ‘Interplanetary Class Classics,’ collaborating with the likes of Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Rebecca Taylor, Phil Oakey, and even the Cowboy from The Village People. This time, they’re bringing new cosmic comrades along for the ride: Nadine Shah, Iggy Pop, Jessica Winter, and Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner.

‘No Rocket Required’ is everything you didn’t know you needed—brassy, unhinged, dreamy, and surprisingly tender. It’s cosmic chaos grounded in real human grit. It’s Carl Sagan spinning in a seedy disco, marveling at the sticky carpet while contemplating the meaning of life.

And in a world that feels like it’s constantly falling apart? Sometimes the best thing we can do is connect, collaborate, rage a little, and dance a lot. That’s what The Moonlandingz are here for.

‘No Rocket Required’ track list

1. Some People’s Music
2. The Sign of A Man
3. Roustabout
4. The Insects Have Been Shat On
5. It’s Where I’m From
6. All Out Of Pop
7. Yama Yama
8. Give Me More
9. Stink Foot
10. The Krack Drought Suite (Pts 1-3)

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