Tag: Album reviews

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. 

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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 quoted 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.’ 

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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.’   

Frank White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the profound awe and sense of insignificance he experienced when he visited the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in early 2025. 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. Reflecting on the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how it shapes our sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the 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 his 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 told Dave 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 (and other stories).

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 his 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 apparent connection to progressive rock, or even to rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. On the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer, Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres. 

OBJECTS OUTLIVE US  

No Monkey’s Paw  

The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.   

First, there is ‘no ghost on the moor’/no open window’. This appears to reference Kate Bush’s 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set ‘Out on the wily, windy moors’, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,  

‘Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy 
I’ve come home, I’m so cold
Let me in your window.’  

Second, there is ‘no monkey’s paw’. The Monkey’s Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkey’s paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, ‘wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.’  

Instead, Wilson’s protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, ‘Did you forget I exist?’ The protagonist blames the alien for playing ‘too hard to get.’ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is ‘a bit tongue in cheek’, but that there was a ‘serious point’, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up ‘with a sense of awe’ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilson’s 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.  

The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alien’s voice is Wilson’s own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on ‘King Ghost’ from The Future Bites. 

The Buddha Of The Modern Age 

The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as ‘The Buddha of the modern age.’ Wilson’s lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is ‘barely paid minimum wage’ for doling out ‘truth and healthy karma.’ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, ‘the blurred photos of the ghosts of men’.  

The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson is rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, ‘I’ve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,’ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that he’s ‘becoming a little more forthright about my veganism.’ 

‘Slaughter our sacred cow
To stuff our stupid mouths 
Already fit to burst  
Still the insatiable thirst 
To kill over and over’  

Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase ‘insatiable thirst’ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, ‘We interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.’  

The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilson’s opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals – the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like ‘Heartattack in a Layby’ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word ‘try’, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track. 

Objects: Meanwhile

The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilson’s admiration for Partridge dates back to XTC’s formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.   

Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTC’s 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that ‘there’s a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.’ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has ‘some of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.’

He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, ‘I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective – a central theme of the album – by providing links or contrasts with what was happening ‘meanwhile, on the other side of the universe.’ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridge’s comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.   

Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,

‘As you queue at the bank for an hour
’Cause a solar flare blew out the power.’

Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,

‘The driver in tears ‘bout his payment arrears 
Still nobody hears when a sun disappears
In a galaxy afar.’  

Sometimes the link is metaphorical, 

‘Her shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing
Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.’  

One of the verses refers to a ‘teenager with his first telescope’, which reflects Wilson’s nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track ‘Endsong’ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, ‘Is there life on Mars?’, the title of David Bowie’s 1973 single.  

Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a ‘post-truth’ world. Partridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about ‘fences’ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about ‘borders’ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that it’s best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, ‘It’s better to live without facts.’   

The track begins with a clear statement of a central musical theme. It’s a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilson’s prog credentials due to its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, ‘in that it constantly ascends in whole tones.’ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples are the end of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk.  

Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagner’s operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973) and Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolò Paganini, was ‘overlooked… [but] I think it’s a bit of a masterpiece, actually.’ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts. 

After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. It’s decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). 

At around 3:30, there’s a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. It’s heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.  

In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travis’ saxophones in the track as ‘Jaxonsaxes’, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is ‘Jaxon’. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.  

The Cicerones/Ark

The archaic word ‘cicerones’ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 – 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. There’s a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The eerie atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Disch’s short story Descending, which inspired Wilson’s previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age.’ 

The Ark represents a new start, like Noah’s escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridge’s lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. It’s a technique that goes back to ‘Open Car’ from Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age’, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. It’s easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, ‘Mars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’

Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to ‘Eclipse’, the epic finale to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). It’s also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe. 

Cosmic Sons of Toil  

The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stéphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that it’s just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase ‘Horny-handed sons of toil.’ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, ‘That’s the fun of analysis.’ 

This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as ‘perfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.’ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated, fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, there’s a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. It’s reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, where the spaceship struggles to fly as it creaks, groans, and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.

No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe 

The first part of this section, ‘No Ghost On The Moor’, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody, but we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilson’s recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life

The second part of this section is an instrumental. The ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,   

‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universe’s final temperature will hover just above absolute zero…  the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’

The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStine’s second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didn’t want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on ‘Comfortably Numb’ from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmour’s playing – he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo is the ‘greatest guitar solo of all time.’ McStine’s solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzman’s languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.  

At around 2:45, there’s a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of ‘very atonal music’ to describe both ‘wonder’ and the feeling that the universe is ‘terrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.’ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a ‘nod to Ligeti’. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphères (1961) by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilson’s words to Humphries, ‘the blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.’ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track ‘Get All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his ‘ambient/noise /experimental project’), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track. 

THE OVERVIEW

Perspective  

Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.

‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena and their sizes. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts.

A megametre = 10^6 = 10⁶ = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million metres

A gigametre = 10^9 = 10⁹ = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion metres 

According to the Scale of the Universe website, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, over twice as big as our moon. It’s 5,268,000 metres in diameter. Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon, 4,821,000 metres in diameter.

Size beyond one megametre 
Ten to the power of six 
Ganymede, Callisto

Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’

What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.

The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).

 

The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.

A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II  

The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.

When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.

‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).   

The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary. The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’

The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’

 ‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,  

‘There’s no reason for any of this 
Just a beautiful infinity 
No design and no one at the wheel 
Just an existential mystery.’ 

The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’ 

After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.

Infinity Measured In Moments  

This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns, building the track’s epic feel and bringing a human element to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, combining an angular, modern feel with a classic, uplifting rock solo.

It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 39 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.

Permanence  

The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.     

Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. The album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’  

The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.

In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.  

This post was updated at 17.27 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)

This post was further updated at 14.00 on 30 December 2025 to add details of the relative sizes of Ganymede and Callisto

Links

Steven Wilson – The Overview Tour – Live Review

Interview – Miles Skarin: Creating ‘The Overview’ film with Steven Wilson (revised post)

Steven Wilson’s Space Songs Part I: The Porcupine Tree Years

Steven Wilson’s Space Songs Part II: The Solo Years

Sources

Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018)
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)
Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34)
Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTC’s Blog, 17 February 2008)
Betz, Eric, The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com)
Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25)
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025)
Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated)
Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025)
Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25)
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)
Rousselot, Stéphane, Interview – Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025)
Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022)
Shatner, William and Brandon, Joshua, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books 2022)
Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25)
‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025)
White, Frank, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)

Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight