If the 1970s were the pinnacle of progressive rock, then the present decade is surely a close second. We are living through the dramatic return of this most noodling of genres – a sort of 2025: A Prog Odyssey. That rebirth has taken many forms, whether it is a revitalised David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd, galloping to number one with his latest solo LP or a new generation of artists bringing a fresh perspective with their expansive riffs on classic rock.
Look around and everyone seems to be going prog. There is the prog metal of groups such as Bell Witch, the fantasy prog of Magic Sword and the prog hip-hop of To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar’s lusciously overwrought instant classic from 2015 (where the flute solos had flute solos).
Recent years have even witnessed the birth of prog folk, the live performances of the Dublin “mutant” trad group Lankum rivalling Floyd in their prime for wigged-out bombast and imaginative use of dry ice and strobe lighting. Music that stretches out a single moment of tension to a snapping point is more voguish today than at any point in the past 50 years.
Amid so much proggy goodness, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year for Steven Wilson, the long-time torch-holder for the discipline. Both as frontman of the band Porcupine Tree (who have a middling following in Ireland yet fill arenas in Britain) and as a solo artist, the progfather has spent his career pleading the case for ambitious and intricate songwriting.
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He isn’t afraid to come across as po-faced – if anything, he embraces the idea. Born in 1967, the year Pink Floyd released their debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Wilson came of age feeling disconnected from the music his friends were into. Especially if it involved Bono banging on about the betterment of humanity.
“I grew up in the ’80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. There were some interesting things developing, but everyone I knew wanted to be in Level 42, Simple Minds or U2,” he said in an interview. “I wasn’t interested in any of that, so I found solace in the ’60s and ’70s music that my parents were listening to.”
He’s at his best on his new solo LP, which arrives ahead of the release in April of a remastered edition of Live at Pompeii, Pink Floyd’s seminal 1972 live album, on which he worked as an engineer.
The spirit of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here unashamedly infuses the wonderful The Overview, a languid sequence of astral projections loosely built around the theme of space travel and of observing Earth from high orbit. If you’ve ever dreamed of sitting in a tin can far above the world, it’s a gravity-defying statement album worth a deep dive.
The Overview’s title comes from the concept of the overview effect, a condition astronauts experience as they gaze, godlike, down at the planet. Obviously, and just as with any self-respecting prog document, it is divided not into individual tacks but into suites – two of them: Objects Outlive Us and The Overview.
Both clock in at close to 25 minutes, which is more than enough time to lose yourself in Wilson’s lush guitars, eerie synths and throbbing evocation of the strangeness of space. There is also a cameo from his wife, Rotem Wilson, who recites mathematical data on the title track, a piece of haunting sci-fi spoken word that adds to the Kubrickian chill. (Other snatches of lyric are by Andy Partridge of the postpunks XTC.)
Wilson contributes vocals, too: his reedy delivery sounds as if it is designed to be swallowed up by the huge ice sheets of melody. The result is an album that feels like one of the better Christopher Nolan films translated to music: it’s vaulted, self-serious and a bit silly.
But the sheer ambition has its own kind of beauty; you’ll be impressed by Wilson’s determination to keep a straight face amid the sonic absurdity. In the best sense, it is out of this world, a pirouetting profusion of prog pyrotechnics that will charm students of the form like a saucerful of secrets.
