THE FUTURE BITES BACK - STEVEN WILSON

GUITAR-BASED MUSIC CONSIGNED TO MUSEUM STATUS, ALBUMS NOTHING MORE THAN ARTIST- CURATED PLAYLISTS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA ALTERING THE COURSE OF EVOLUTION… WHAT THE FRIGGIN’ PROG IS GOING ON, MR WILSON?

- David Mead

It’s obviously been extremely hard to release and promote an album essentially into a vacuum,” Steven Wilson says at the start of our Zoom interview. “There’s no touring. There’s no record store appearances. There’s no TV I can do. I can’t travel to Europe and do the press and TV I would normally have done. So I basically sat at home talking to people on Zoom like I am now, which is pretty much all I can do…”

The irony is that Steven’s latest album, The Future Bites, paints the picture of a society dominated and shaped by its online activity. This is a future that can’t be too far off as more and more we live, shop, listen to music and generally amuse ourselves through the weird wide web, seeking ‘little bubbles of happiness’ often manifested in online shopping sprees – something addressed in Steven’s track Personal Shopper, which also features a cameo appearance by none other than Elton John.

Whereas previously Steven’s albums have been guitar dominated – something you can trace back to his Porcupine Tree days – The Future Bites focuses more on keyboard-generated electronica for its principal instrumental thrust. The guitar is still there, but this time around it’s in a supporting role. We were curious as to why, naturally, but first of all there is the question of releasing the album while live music is still a wasteland and any promotion is similarly stymied.

It must have been disappointing to wait a year to release an album, hoping things would be returning to normal by now, only to find that very little had in fact changed.