STEVEN WILSON – The Overview (2025)

STEVEN WILSON releases his eighth studio album, ”The Overview”, on 14th March 2025. The two track (divided into various parts / tracks), forty-two-minute​ album is his most audacious to date, inspired by the “overview effect” experienced by astronauts looking back at the Earth from space.
”The Overview” sees Wilson return to expansive, progressive music, a genre he helped redefine and popularize with both his solo and Porcupine Tree releases. The two wildly ambitious tracks are each made up of distinctive musical sections that flow from one to the other, playing out as unique and continuous pieces.

Wilson’s 21st-century progressive music updates the classic ‘prog’ musical palette to incorporate everything from glistening electronics to post-rock and beyond, which brings the genre right into the beating heart of the current musical landscape. The album also features a set of lyrics by XTC’s Andy Partridge that help drive the story in “Objects Outlive Us”.
”The Overview” is instantly recognizable as Steven Wilson and will stand alone as an utterly unique release for 2025. Headphones and a wide-open mind are recommended.

Steven Wilson doesn’t like to repeat himself. He has often said so, and always proved it in his solo career, even if it left some of his many fans dubious about his musical evolution. If, by trying too hard to intellectualize his music, he disappointed many with “The Harmony Codex”, let’s acknowledge that the album marked a turning point after a period initiated by “To The Bone”, and perpetuated with “The Future Bites”, during which he desperately chased public recognition.
A recognition he rightly felt he deserved, but which never really arrived. Buoyed by a now-stabilized family life and the wisdom of the passing years, he began to distance himself from this narcissistic ambition with the soothing “The Harmony Codex”, and he seems to have mourned it once and for all with “The Overview”.

With two tracks, no single, and a vertiginous theme about the immensity of the universe and humanity’s derisory place within it, this new album is a declaration of love to the concept album, to long epic pieces, and above all to what music can offer when it still dares to take its time.
“The Overview” is a cosmic odyssey, heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s dizzying vision of space in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The Overview” is an album conceived as a journey, during which the listener is treated to a succession of musical scenes, perfectly arranged and highly coherent when taken as a whole.
The 23-minute opening track, ‘Objects Outlive Us’, hooks us from the very first seconds with its spectral voice floating in the void, synth strings and weightless strings, before a succession of high-flying, perfectly composed musical passages take us on a totally immersive journey.
With chiseled lyrics by Andy Partridge (XTC), Steven Wilson explores the striking contrast between the infinitely great and the infinitely trivial, between the insignificance of the things that obsess us and the cold beauty of the cosmos, illustrated in particular by a magnificent, tension-filled guitar solo by Randy McStine.

The 18-minute track ‘The Overview’ takes us in a different musical direction. More intimate, more contemplative, it describes the immensity of space, galaxies, black holes and the wonders of the cosmos, enumerated by Rotem Wilson (Steven’s wife) in a passage reminiscent of earlier tracks like ‘Perfect Life’ or ‘Staircase’. The few electronic incursions and subtle piano arpeggios lend ‘The Overview’ a melancholy, hypnotic, almost anxiety-inducing beauty, sublimated by Theo Travis’s soaring saxophone, which weaves a soundscape of icy beauty.
The listener is then left to drift through space, alone, with no hope of return, listening to the magnificent instrumental coda suspended in the immensity of the void.

With “The Overview”, Steven Wilson refuses to take the easy way out, combining all his musical appetites, from atmospheric rock to metal, post rock and, of course, progressive rock. This magnificent album must be listened to in one sitting. It needs time and quiet to be appreciated, and, as always with the Brit, a good pair of headphones. And well well worth the effort. Some will hear nods to other progressive rock bands, but the real strength of the album is that it sounds like nothing more than Steven Wilson, and boy, does it feel good.

“The Overview” perfectly combines musical research, raw emotion and existential reflection, and avoids the pitfall of pretentious prog that often plagues this kind of exercise. Not only does Steven Wilson sign his most brilliant album since “Hand.Cannot.Erase.”, he also delivers a work that, in a few years’ time, will be an indisputable reference in his discography.
Highly Recommended

01. Objects Outlive Us (23:17):
– No Monkey’s Paw
– The Buddha of the Modern Age
– Objects: Meanwhile
– The Cicerones
– Ark
– Cosmic Sons of Toil
– No Ghost on the Moor
– Heat Death of the Universe

02. The Overview (18:27):
– Perspective
– A Beautiful Infinity I
– Borrowed Atoms
– A Beautiful Infinity II
– Infinity Measured in Moments
– Permanence

Steven Wilson – vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass, percussion
with:
Adam Holzman – keyboards
Randy McStine – guitars
Craig Blundell – drums

Pre order:
store.stevenwilsonhq.com/product/155993