Closer to The Moon

An intimate portrait of the Earth's closest neighbor—the Moon—that explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with it

Phototroph, the dizzying third album by Long Island’s Moon Tooth, feels like a tribute to all the weird, forward-thinking music that’s found itself in rotation on alternative rock radio over the past 25 years. For as long as post-grunge and nü metal have been the dominant genres on terrestrial stations with names like “The Blitz” and “The X,” stranger things have crept in at the margins: Deftones’s off-kilter emotionalism; Queens of the Stone Age’s swaggering, stoned zen; the swampy prog-sludge of Mastodon. For fleeting moments on Phototroph, Moon Tooth resemble all those bands, but the clearest line of influence lay in how their idiosyncrasies serve their outsized ambitions.

The moon is such a familiar presence in the sky that most of us take it for granted. But what if it wasn't where it is now? How would that affect life on Earth? Space scientist and lunar fanatic Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores our intimate relationship with the moon. Besides orchestrating the tides, the moon dictates the length of a day, the rhythm of the seasons and the very stability of our planet.