His Eighth Solo Album
The Overview is Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilson’s albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as ‘a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.’
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void,” shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, ‘All the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.’ He quotes the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldn’t make someone religious.
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was – ironically – from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should ‘rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.’
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Souce: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, ‘cosmic vertigo’, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilson’s lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.’ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson’s solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion, or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, ‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the effect of profound awe and a feeling of insignificance when he visited the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) in the Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2025. When completed, the ELT will be able to see further into space and further back in time than any previous telescope. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Thinking about the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how that creates a sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the IMAX album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but it’s not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilson’s previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been ‘very divisive amongst my fans.’ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasn’t sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as ‘a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.’ Wilson’s original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a ‘split second moment’ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in my head.’ He saw it as a ‘piece of cinema for the ears.’
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about ‘planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.’ It was time to ‘write an album about something bigger than us.’
Humphries asked him why he was ‘asking these bigger questions’ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having ‘my own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own life’. Even so, he found it ‘fascinating’ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that ‘intuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.’
‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson said to Everley, ‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, ‘Detonation’; it also contained a happy pop song, ‘Permanating.’ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, ‘Personal Shopper’ was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, ‘from the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before’, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, it’s far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing.
The Album’s Structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, ‘Objects Outlive Us’ and ‘The Overview.’ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was ‘a wilfully uncommercial gesture’ and that ‘the reason there are two pieces is I’m old and I still think in terms of vinyl.’
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973), Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked ‘great double albums with just one track per side.’ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a ‘much maligned record, but I love it.’
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that ‘the idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… It’s nice when something this strong falls into your lap.’ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that ‘one doorway led to the next’, and that the album flowed out of him, ‘it doesn’t always work that way.’ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at this home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation (2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no obvious connection to the world of progressive rock, or even rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had also seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. For the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with the likes of Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
Links
Sources
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025)
‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025)
Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview, (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25)
Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier, (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025)
Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25)
Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025)
Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated)
Prasad , Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25)
Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
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