John Mitchell, guitarist, singer-songwriter and producer known for his work with It Bites, Frost*, Arena and Asia, has announced the final Lonely Robot album. An Ending will be released on September 11th, 2026, via White Knight Records, on CD and vinyl.
Mitchell began Lonely Robot, inspired by a single image: Carl Sagan requesting that the cameras on Voyager 2 be turned around before the probe left our solar system forever. What came back was the Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. A barely visible speck suspended in a ray of light. That image, and everything Sagan wrote about it, is where Lonely Robot was born.
Over five albums, Mitchell has followed an astronaut stranded in space, unable to return home. He gazes down at that pale blue dot and asks the kind of questions Sagan spent his life wrestling with. What are we? Why do we behave as we do? What does it mean to be human? The first three Lonely Robot albums looked outward at our species. The fourth and fifth turned the lens inward, as the same frailties the astronaut had observed in humanity, he began to recognise in himself. The grand philosophical questions became something far more personal. The big picture and the individual life are, it turns out, the same thing.
An Ending is where the two threads finally come together. Mitchell always sensed that this would be the conclusion for Lonely Robot, but the astronaut’s journey of discovery and acceptance was an important story to tell.
Mitchell comments, “With this album, I wanted to close the circle of the Lonely Robot universe and bring back some of the elements that inspired the initial writing process.”
The astronaut has now travelled the full distance. He accepts, at long last, that he will never return home. Although there is grief in that, there is also, finally, peace
Mitchell concludes, “I hope Lonely Robot fans find this to be a fitting epilogue to the most creative decade of my life.”
An Ending releases on September 11th, 2026, on CD and double vinyl.
Pre-order now at: www.lonelyrobot.co.uk
John Mitchell – Vocals, guitars, bass guitar, keyboards.
Craig Blundell (Frost*, Steve Hackett, Steven Wilson) – Drums
Jez Fielder – Additional Guitar on The River and Rearview
Track List
This World Window
Show The Way
Back To The Middle
In Ocean Light
Ad Astra
Where In The World
Twin Suns
The River
Rearview
Bending Light
The Iron Sea
Oblique
Synthetic (Bonus track – vinyl only)
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