Steven Wilson

BIOGRAPHY

Steven Wilson is one of contemporary music’s definitive auteurs. A musical polymath who thrives on subverting expectations. A six-time Grammy nominee and spatial audio pioneer who’s remixed the likes of New Order, The Who, King Crimson, Suede, XTC and Tears For Fears. A lover of stories (cinema, gothic horror, science fiction, real life) with a clear-eyed take on what makes a great one, and the power of sound to convey it. An excavator of the human condition, in all its blackened twists – isolation, screen addiction, serial killers, the nihilistic depths of our troubled race.

Now, on his eighth solo album, the Porcupine Tree founder peers into our greatest existential dilemmas. Who are we? What are we? What is our purpose? Written, produced and mixed by Wilson, The Overview takes the listener on a Kubrickian journey into the overwhelming vastness of space, seeing humanity for what it really is – tiny, insignificant, dwarfed by distances involving billions of years.

“Ultimately The Overview is an album about one simple thing; perspective. The numbers are just mind-blowing,” Wilson says. “So for me, the interest was in trying to create something that would do justice to the sheer size of space and our place in relation to it. Most of the time space is portrayed, in TV and movies, it’s shown in a kind of cuddly Star Wars way. But in reality it's a cold, dark, unforgiving place of death and nothingness. The word ‘huge’ doesn't even do justice to it.”

Seeds were planted in early 2023, when Wilson met with Space Rocks founder Alexander Milas to discuss a possible collaboration. At the time, he was undecided on his next move. Following 2023’s The Harmony Codex (his third UK Top 5 album), he’d wondered if he might pursue some kind of multimedia project or work with a filmmaker. He and Milas talked about ‘the overview effect’ - a cognitive shift reportedly experienced by astronauts as they look at Earth from space. This notion of perspective – on such a majestic, unnerving scale – gave Wilson the catalyst he needed.

“Once I had that conversation with Alex, it immediately suggested what my next record would be. I knew it had to be long form pieces. I knew it would be conceptual, and would take more of a ‘progressive’ approach. It's a big concept that I can really get my teeth into, and the sort of record I haven't made for a while. I suppose in some ways it’s the last thing people might have expected me to do now, which is something else that made the idea appeal to me.”

Comprising two long tracks split into movements and accompanied by an immersive film from Miles Skarin (who directed videos for singles from The Harmony Codex and 2021’s The Future Bites) The Overview is a high concept audio-visual experience, free of the cliches associated with ‘space rock’. It’s about the universe, and our place in it. There are 2001-style tunnels of light. Gauzy starscapes. Burning forests and oil spills. Astronomical wonders and human failings that most of us refuse to see, all of them reflected in The Overview’s sounds and imagery.

“There’s a line in a movie that says the human species behaves like a virus” says Wilson, a devoted vegan and animal lover. “There's no other way of looking at it. We've been here for less than 10,000th of the time that the Earth has existed and it will continue to exist long after we’re extinct, completely oblivious to the fact we were briefly it’s tenants.”

In a striking piece of storytelling, the album opens with an alien on a dark, dreamlike moor. Channeling Wilson’s interest in our screen-gazing tendencies – captured in The Future Bites, as well as Porcupine Tree’s seminal Fear Of A Blank Planet – the alien asks, ‘Did you forget I exist?’ The first track then follows its trajectory through the destruction and evacuation of earth, ending up on its home planet.

“I don't want to characterise this as another of my records where I'm bemoaning the existence of social media,” Wilson says, “but that does continue to be a subtext in my lyrics. Our species don’t seem to be curious about the universe anymore, we don’t look up at the stars because we’re too busy looking down at our devices.”

Sonically you’ll hear flavours from his boundary-averse palate. The scale of The Harmony Codex. The tender, shadowed soul of Hand. Cannot. Erase. The gnarly menace of Grace For Drowning. Production vocabulary from his mixing work. It all pours into elegant labyrinths of guitars, electronics, spiny bass grooves and warm, lush soundscapes. Cinematic tension in places and nihilistic black noise in others – tempered by soaring, progressive rock peaks embedded in his DNA.

“I fell into the cauldron of Pink Floyd when I was a kid. It comes out naturally, and I embrace that. But I think the biggest influence these days is to try and do something different, and something that would excite me. And those, really, are my only two criteria for going forward.”

Mainstays from his solo band helped, including Craig Blundell on drums and Adam Holzman on keyboards, alongside some glorious extended solos delivered by guitarist Randy McStine, who played in the touring lineup of Porcupine Tree for 2022’s Closure/Continuation (number 2 in the UK, number 1 in Germany and The Netherlands.)

“Randy is an incredible talent,” enthuses Wilson, who plays most of the rest of the instruments including bass, guitar, and keyboards. “What I love about him is that in many ways he channels the classic rock approach, but in a way that doesn't sound old fashioned. He's always got a little twist on things that makes them sound fresh and innovative.”

Elsewhere, lyrics for one movement, Objects: Meanwhile, were written by XTC’s Andy Partridge – juxtaposing kitchen-sink vignettes (a shopping bag breaking, a woman daydreaming of murdering her husband) with images of exploding nebulas and imploding black holes. Later on, Wilson’s wife Rotem channels an unnerving, HAL-style persona as she recites mind-boggling statistics concerning the distances from earth of various galaxies, stars and other cosmic phenomena (‘Size beyond one zettametre, 10 to the power of 21, Milky Way, Andromeda Galaxy, Fornax cluster’).

But it’s not all intergalactic notes and smalltown soap operas. In a subtle nod to 2013’s The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), two movements are named after gothic horror stories – No Monkey’s Paw (W.W. Jacobs’ Edwardian spinechiller The Monkey’s Paw) and The Cicerones (Robert Aickman’s 1967 story of the same title). Short tales concerned, ultimately, with similar existential questions.

“The nature of life after death, dealing with things beyond our understanding, trying to articulate that in a piece of music, it's all about human beings trying to reconcile existence. Why do we create horror stories? Why do we create films about space? Why do we do any of these things? We try to understand the human condition, and where we are in relation to this huge, unfathomable space that we occupy.”

There’s something liberating about that; embracing the simple futility of our existence. It’s a weight off our shoulders. Incentive to make the most of this random gift of life. For all The Overview’s dark places and jagged edges, that breath of hope is conveyed through its warmer passages, and in particular its closing section – sending the listener floating endlessly into stars.

The Overview is not what the world expects in 2025. It makes no concessions to anyone, and it’s all the more thrilling for it. “It’s asking a lot from anyone that listens to it,” Wilson concludes. “But then I’ve never been inclined to underestimate my listener.”