Prog icon Steven Wilson will soon drop his eighth studio album and he has offered an update in which he describes it as a two-part epic of untrammelled progressive rock with a guitar solo that will “reinvent the notion of the extended classic rock solo”.
Speaking to the NME, Wilson gave prog-rock fans the news they want to hear. He is going all-in with the conceptual approach, and The Overview – named for the disorientation that astronauts feel when they return to terra firma – is similarly bold in its vision as Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd were at the height of their creative powers.
“It’s not a nostalgic sounding record,” he said, “but I hold my hands up and say it’s an old-fashioned piece of conceptual rock, in the tradition of The Dark Side Of The Moon and Tubular Bells. That’s a constant throughout my career. But this record, because it’s a concept of two long pieces, plays even more into a progressive rock trope.”
All this conceptual world-building gives the players some room to stretch out of course. Randy McStine, who is presently touring lead guitarist for the reunited Porcupine Tree, delivers a bravura performance. And Wilson has given it the big build-up.
“I said to Randy: ‘We’re going to reinvent the notion of the extended classic rock solo’,” said Wilson. “I told Randy: ‘This is going to be the not ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo. I wanted something with the same feeling of drama, but which is a million light years away from it. What Randy did is one of the highlights of the record.”
David Gilmour, eat your heart out. The release of the The Overview will be accompanied by a feature length animated film from director Miles Skarin, a long-time collaborator of Wilson’s. As with the Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary, its theatrical release opens at London’s BFI IMAX theatre, on the largest screen in Britain. That immersive experience is what Wilson hopes to bring to the live shows.
You can read the full interview at the NME. Porcupine Fans should – and will – lap this up, not least that Wilson reveals the band have been writing songs together, hinting that this could lead to a new album somewhere down the line.
It will be interesting to hear what McStine’s part sounds like. Wilson has spoken before about guitar’s need to evolve. In 2021, he told Face Culture, guitar was stuck in the 20th century.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that we do live in an electronic world,” he said. “All the sound around us all day long, from our laptops, our phones, even our doorbell, it’s all electronic sound. And that’s the world we live in now, and I think there’s a sense that the guitar now almost belongs to the past.
“I still love it. I still love the guitar. But it seems to me now the sound of the guitar is the sound of the second half of the 20th century, in the way that jazz music was the sound of the first half of the 20th century, and was kind of wiped out by rock ’n’ roll in the second half of the 20th century.”
The Overview will be released on 14 March through Fiction Records.
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