Imogen Heap has been on the phone for just over an hour when she begins wondering aloud what the algorithm might make of our conversation. What will social media latch onto, once her sprawling thoughts breach the containment of our call? Which quotes will circulate the internet, stripped of context? The English musician is all too familiar with how nuanced, thoughtful arguments can mutate into blunt-force soundbites once they’re unleashed online, especially when they question the endless doomsaying that these media platforms “feast on” – as Heap’s ideas often do. 

This is not to say that Imogen Heap is purely optimistic about where we’re heading as a species, or what we’re doing to our home planet. Far from it. “I think we all feel like we’re on the edge of a very chaotic period in our human story,” she says. “We have let ourselves go. We’re passing on responsibility to others. There’s too much power in the wrong places. We’re going to see an uncomfortable shift – we have to, in order to survive.” 

It’s this vital shift that forms the basis of How to Live on Earth, a newly-released documentary that bills itself as a “how-to video” for the future of humanity on Earth, for which Heap has written the rousing song “Chapter 4”. The title of the track, which is imagined as a modern “campfire song” with organic, percussive beats, refers to the core concept of the film. In short: there have been three phases to the history of Earth so far, from its time as a barren space rock pelted by asteroids, through the emergence of simple lifeforms, to the evolution of “intelligent” life. Unfortunately, as the prime example of this “intelligent” life, we’ve managed to spread across vast swathes of the planet and have come to threaten the very existence of its natural systems with reckless, extractive behaviours. Which is why chapter four – when intelligent life finally becomes wise, and acts as a positive force for the planet – can’t come soon enough.

Heap poses it in a different way, as a question. “How can we grow into this space where we are not the ridiculous creatures that we appear to be?” she says. “If you look at our social media and at the news, the idea of what humans have become is insane. We need to move on. We need to grow. Like... what are we doing? We’re destroying everything.”

Heap was initially asked to contribute music to How to Live on Earth by her “dear friend” Dan O’Neill, a field biologist who appears in the film as a kind of Indiana Jones figure (only he’s searching for elusive jungle cats instead of long-lost treasure). At first, she was reluctant. “I don’t really want to write songs anymore,” she explains, which is a big claim from someone who’s worked as a singer and songwriter for almost 30 years. But then they sat down and watched it together, and she was drawn in by the documentary’s attempts – amid footage of deforestation and toxic mining sites, and bleak statistics on biodiversity – to answer the kinds of questions she had on her mind, in a meaningful and practical way.

“I felt positive for the first time in a really long time,” she says, citing stories from the film including a dam removal completed in 2024, which marked a major milestone in an effort led by California’s Yurok tribe to revive the Klamath river and its historic salmon runs. In fact, many of the film’s most inspiring stories explore indigenous communities and the knowledge they already possess about how to live more responsibly in relation to their environments. Other hopeful tales include the transformation of prison inmates’ lives via a rehabilitation program for sick turtles, and the restoration of underwater reefs by playing them “coral jazz”. “There are solutions to these things, just as much as there is dark stuff and insanity in the world,” Heap realised. “But we don’t see it. There are thousands more positive stories, but we don’t hear those. It’s so important that we hear stories like this right now.”

There are some stories that Heap feels slightly more ambivalent about. Take, for example, a Chinese community who have been left to pollinate their pear orchard by hand after pesticides killed the local bee population. In How to Live on Earth, they’re shown trialling a drone to “do the bees’ work” and keep their trees alive. On the one hand, it looks like something lifted from a speculative solarpunk fantasy. But Heap says: “I just think that’s fucking depressing, man. Drones pollinating trees? For fuck’s sake.” Then again, she admits, it’s not meant as a final solution. “Maybe technology right now is like a band-aid, a plaster on where we’ve really gone wrong. But please let’s not stop there. Let’s use this as a transitional phase.” Bring back the bees.

“Drones pollinating trees? For fuck’s sake” – Imogen Heap

Heap’s relationship with technology has always been complex. She made her name with electronic, effect-heavy songs like “Hide and Seek” but increasingly “feels a bit fake” sitting down to make tracks in a studio, at a time when the authenticity of all creative work is under fresh scrutiny. In 2024 she debuted an AI twin called Mogen, including a custom voice model, but she’s never actually made music with generative AI – though again, she adds, “Nobody seems to want to believe you anymore… which is really annoying”. Then there’s her trademark Mi.Mu gloves, which enable her to chop and change her own voice in real time; they’re a pioneering piece of tech, but they’re actually designed to “feel second nature” and free up the human side of Heap’s performance, so that she doesn’t have to fiddle with equipment or stare at a screen. And while she’s frustrated by the “negative spirals” created by the web economy that emerged in the 2010s, she’s also made forays into blockchain technologies (as early as 2015) in an ongoing effort to better compensate artists for their work.

“I’ve always loved hearing how people interpret, use, steal, or share the songs. I don’t feel possessive in any way” – Imogen Heap

Looking ahead, Heap compares what’s happening now, via deals between companies such as Warner and the AI music generator Suno, to the advent of streaming, where musicians saw their profits depleted and their ownership over their work thrown into question. “It’s fucking happening again,” she says, highlighting the lack of transparency about whose data actually goes into training the music-generating models, and how they’re compensated. And this criticism isn’t coming from a place of selfishness or egotism. Heap isn’t exactly over-protective about her own music, after all, with many fans first encountering her work via samples in tracks by Jason Derulo, A$AP Rocky, Lil B, Ariana Grande and Clams Casino – or, for a new generation, fakemink, Lucy Bedroque, and Trippie Redd. “I feel so lucky when that happens,” she says. “I’ve always loved hearing how people interpret, use, steal or share the songs. I don’t feel possessive in any way.”

What is frustrating – of course – is when a corporation profits off an artist's work without permission, and doesn’t even credit them in the process. True to the spirit of How to Live On Earth, Heap believes there’s a solution to this problem too. In fact, more than just believing it, she’s spent years trying to actually make it happen. “It really keeps me up at night,” she says. “I have literally spent hundreds of hours speaking with policymakers, building technology, working with think tanks, trying to spread the word about how each individual person can give permissions or not, and how that can be to the betterment of everyone.”

Part of her long-term effort to “future-proof” music for artists is the digital ID company Auracles, where artists can set their permissions for any given work, and companies, labels and other artists can check those permissions in a clear, verifiable way. In late 2025, Auracles partnered with Soundcloud, but adoption remains the main hurdle. Heap is frank about the slow uptake of the tech she’s helped develop and the doubts it raises in her own mind. “I’m like, am I mad?” she says. “Am I just flogging a dead horse?”

The problem, perhaps, is that we’ve grown too used to the idea that nothing we can do makes a difference. “Everybody’s recycling and things, and it seems we’re doing it because we desperately want to help,” Heap suggests. “But we also know that it’s not really helping in the grand scheme of things. There are wars creating more fucking CO2 than all of our rubbish put together for like a thousand years.” But, as Heap says, that’s why stories about what we can do – about the power of our collective efforts – are so important right now. 

Unfortunately, telling stories like those in How to Live on Earth also means coming to terms with what we’ve allowed to happen so far, in the third chapter of Earth’s history. That’s easier said than done. “We can’t look at ourselves,” says Heap. “Anyone who is not absolutely aghast at what we have become, at what we can see every day on our phones, and is not terrified of where humans are going, is insane, or just hiding under a rock.” On the plus side, if and when we’re able to get over ourselves and meet our own eyes in the mirror, there’s still a lot of life left to be lived. “We’re early. We’re only young. We’re still in our teenage years,” she suggests. “We’re running rampant, making a mess of shit, not thinking about the future.” And yes, the worst might even be yet to come. “I can’t imagine it being any other way,” she adds, “because that’s the only thing that will shock us into action.” But the hope is – and it’s a big hope – that we’ll emerge from that shock as more mature human beings, wiser, and ready for Chapter 4.

How to Live on Earth had its world premiere on June 22, 2026. It is now available to watch in full via YouTube.