Wednesday 3 June 2026
Polygon Portal, Soho. London
★★★★★
Last night, I had an experience that could have come from a Steven Wilson album when I returned to my hotel after the launch of his ninth solo album. The Harmony Codex, his seventh studio album, is partly based on his own short story of the same name, which, in turn, is inspired by Thomas M. Disch’s 1968 story Descending, published in the collection Fun With Your New Head. In that story, the protagonist becomes trapped on a never-ending series of descending escalators. In my hotel, as in Wilson’s story, I got trapped in a seemingly endless series of staircases, trying to find my room, before I eventually found my way back down to Reception and asked for directions.
The characters in Wilson’s as yet unnamed new album are also trapped, in a village with no name that isn’t on any map; you can only find it if you aren’t looking for it, and it exists outside of time and space. Wilson told us, in a brief spoken introduction at the album launch last night, that you will never leave. You can go to the station and buy a train ticket, but the train will bring you back to the station. When you die, you are absorbed into the landscape. It’s peaceful, but there’s something else lurking there…
In his intro, Wilson made some nostalgic references to children’s TV programmes, to which many members of the audience nodded, Bagpuss, Trumpton and Catweazle. Perhaps the most helpful reference he made was to the 1973 folk horror masterpiece The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland and Christopher Lee. Woodwood plays Sergeant Neil Howie, who travels to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl. As a devout Christian, Howie is horrified that the island’s isolated inhabitants practise paganism.
Wilson has experimented briefly with AI, using it to help him write the lyrics for his Christmas song, December Skies. But he says that the new album is ‘anti-AI.’ He told Dave Ling of Prog, “My mantra for this record is, could AI have come up with it? If the answer is yes, then I ditch it…. I’m very keen on keeping the little quirks and imperfections.” As we will see, there are moments when these imperfections can be heard, but rest assured, the album is immaculately recorded and beautifully mixed. It sounded absolutely stunning in surround sound on the incredible system in the listening room at Polygon Portal. It was similar to the experience of listening to the launch of The Harmony Codex at EartH in Hackney.
After Wilson took us to the other side of the cosmos in the space epic, The Overview, we are now firmly back on terra firma. But it’s a disturbing place to be; this isn’t a rural idyll. At various points on the album, Wilson uses the Scottish actor David Tennant (the tenth Doctor Who) to recite various pastoral poems, with frightening lines such as ‘if you enter, you will never come out.’
Another possible reference point is the British horror film Village of the Damned (1960). The film is based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham, in which the children develop the ability to read minds and manipulate adults. At times on the new album, we hear children’s voices, which sound eerie in context. There’s also the sound of a church choir, which may remind some listeners of Light Mass Prayers from the 1996 Porcupine Tree album Signify (although that song was written by the band’s drummer, Chris Maitland).
There are other evocative sound effects: the album opens with church bells, recalling the Pink Floyd track High Hopes from The Division Bell (1994). We also hear a dog barking, recalling Dogs (Animals, 1977). There’s another possible Floydian influence, the frequent use of beaters rather than drumsticks on drums, a technique often used by Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason. (At one point, there’s a deliberate mis-timed beat, in line with Wilson’s idea that the music couldn’t have been generated by AI). Wilson has said that Pink Floyd is part of his DNA, but that’s where the Pink Floyd influence ends, except perhaps in one aspect: the album is very richly sound-scaped like The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and is a long-form concept album that demands complete attention from beginning to end, feeling like one song rather than a series of separate tracks.
Wilson likes to reinvent himself for each album, and the new album feels like nothing he has ever done before, but some reference points from his earlier work are helpful. There are elements of the Storm Corrosion album he released in 2012 with Mikael Åkerfeldt of the progressive metal band Opeth, particularly the eerie, out-of-tune guitars. Parts of the album have a similar feel to the latest Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation, with some phenomenal bass lines (presumably played by Wilson himself, as on that album and on The Overview). There are some Richard Barbieri-style sparkling keyboards and soundscapes. There are also some nostalgic lo-fi sounds that Wilson loves to include, despite the overall pristine quality of his mixes. There are wobbly keyboards, and a reference in the lyrics to ‘old songs on a tape.’ Another line starts ‘follow me down’, familiar from the chorus of Lazarus from Deadwing.
There are also some very heavy, proggy riffs that will appeal to Porcupine Tree fans who enjoy the run of three classic albums, Deadwing (2022), In Absentia (2025), and Fear of a Blank Planet (2007), that included elements of progressive metal. On the new album, these riffs are viscerally exciting. Porcupine Tree fans will also enjoy the reference to a common Wilson trope: trains. (Those of us who were at the Porcupine Tree open-air gig in Manchester will recall the moment of serendipity when a real train went past just as Wilson was singing Trains). Wilson has often associated trains with nostalgia for his childhood, hearing the trains at the local station while he was falling asleep at night, but here the image is sinister: ‘you might get on a train, but you’ll never escape.’
Wilson has never really dabbled in folk music, with the exception of The Unquiet Grave, a 15th-century English folk song arranged by him, which was the B-side to his 2006 single, The Guitar Lesson (later collected on the 2014 Cover Version compilation). At times, it has a similar feel to the psychedelic folk of his Storm Corrosion collaboration. The Unquiet Grave has an eerie, melancholy feel, and on the new album, the folk song ‘There lived an old lady’ is equally creepy, bathed in reverse echo. Later on the album, there’s another folk-infused tune. This also ties in with the folk horror theme; a closer study of the lyrics will reveal the exact role of the villagers in the album’s concept, but on first listen, I wondered whether they play the role of the villagers in Benjamin Britten’s operas, Albert Herring and Peter Grimes in which they close ranks on an outsider. At the end of the album, there’s a terrifying shout, ‘You’ll stay with us’, which reminded me of the lynch mob in Peter Grimes.
At the end, I sat for a moment, meditating on what I had just heard. It had been a visceral, almost cathartic experience, and listeners near me sat as if almost in shock. Wilson continues to reinvent himself, while retaining the highest possible standards in writing, recording, playing and mixing, making him a truly progressive artist. Hopefully, AI will never be able to replicate his unique mix of talents and create something entirely new rather than a mere pastiche of his work. If it ever does, we will probably be joining the villagers to escape from the world.
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