STEVEN WILSON

The Overview FICTION

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The Overview is not a typical Classic Rock album of the year. It's not a straight-shooting rock record by a straight-shooting rock musician. The fact that it nonetheless topped our list feels oddly hopeful; a vote of confidence in rock circa 2025. It's indicative of how much is still possible, in a field that's often proclaimed lazily to be out of ideas.

With strong elements of pop, rock, prog, jazz, electronica, industrial noise and more in his musical blood, Steven Wilson has continued to surprise, affront and delight his considerable fan base. And yet he struggled with this one, initially at least. On the back of 2023's excellent The Harmony Codex, he found himself at a creative crossroads – wondering whether to make a new album at all.

“The Harmony Codex was a lot of work, and I was very proud of it, but I wasn’t sure where to go next,” Wilson told us ahead of The Overview’s release. “I started thinking: 'Well, maybe the next thing I do shouldn’t be a new record, maybe it should be some collaboration with multimedia or with a filmmaker.'

In the end he effectively wound up doing both. Following a conversation with Space Rocks founder Alexander Milas, about a space travel phenomenon known as 'the overview effect' – whereby astronauts experience a powerful cognitive shift as they look down at Earth from outer space – he tuned in to the notion of perspective. How small we really are. How terrifying that realisation can be – and also how liberating.

Teaming up with film director Miles Skarin, they created an epic yet incisive audiovisual journey into the furthest reaches of the cosmos – as subconsciously in thrall to Pink Floyd's finest hours as to 2001: