Band:	Steven Wilson
Album:	The Overview
Style:	Progressive rock
Release date:	March 14, 2025
A review by:	RaduP

Disc I [The Overview]
01. Objects Outlive Us
    1 - No Monkey's Paw
    2 - The Buddha Of The Modern Age
    3 - Objects: Meanwhile
    4 - The Cicerones
    5 - Ark
    6 - Cosmic Sons Of Toil
    7 - No Ghost On The Moor
    8 - Heat Death Of The Universe
02. The Overview
    1 - Perspective
    2 - A Beautiful Infinity I
    3 - Borrowed Atoms
    4 - A Beautiful Infinity II
    5 - Infinity Measured In Moments
    6 - Permanence

Disc II [The Alterview] [Deluxe Edition Bonus]
01. Orchestral Objects
02. Beautiful Infinity [early version]
03. Unused Objects
04. No Ghost On The Moor [alternate version]
05. Permanence [extended version]



A return to longer form songwriting for Steven Wilson.

I've been a fan of Steven Wilson's work, both solo and as part of various projects, for quite a long time, and when I first got into his music I was part of a bunch of prog groups on Facebook and I could see the reverence that people had for him, but most specifically for his more straight-forwardly prog stuff. Of course it makes sense that people of a prog group would be into prog, but I rarely if ever saw mentions of his projects like I.E.M. or No-Man or Bass Communion. I was there when To The Bone dropped, seeing firsthand the reception for the more poppy material on it, some of it pretty much calling it blasphemy. It is then somewhat ironic that my first time covering his music here was for his most pop album. Considering the backlash to a couple of poppier songs on the preceding album, imagine how an entire album that's mostly synthpop had. In my next review I talked about how Wilson has been a prog artist and has veered away from prog since the beginning of his career, and pigeonholing into a sound is a disservice. Still, when the news of a new record hits, my first question is how prog is it.

The Overview is the most overtly progressive of his work since Hand. Cannot. Erase. (counting solo material, otherwise it would be Closure / Continuation), even if stating outright that it is prog might lead people to wrong expectations. To rephrase it another way, since the issue that most hardcore fans had with his recent run is less the lower amount of prog but rather the high amount of pop, The Overview is the least pop of his works in a long time. The closest to pop that it gets is the fact that some melodies brought to the forefront have a ballad-like feel to them, so it's only pop in the same way that Porcupine Tree or Pink Floyd are pop. Now that we got the pop boogeyman out of the way, what is The Overview actually like.

I have a fondness for albums I find structurally interesting. And this "each side is a song" one is pretty great because of how much it prioritizes the flow as compared to lifting any particular song. Even if Steven has never been too much of a song-centric artist and the full album listen has always been preferred, The Overview is among the highest in terms of how much more it makes sense to give it a full listen instead of trying to find individual songs within it (streaming versions contain both the full long songs, as well as divisions into subtracks). Even if most of his previous albums have had long songs, to have a song be properly long by prog standards you need even more than the usual ten minutes mark, and the two tracks here feel properly long in a way that Steven hasn't done in a while, so it's refreshing to hear that longer form songwriting in full throttle. The long tracks divided into subtracks does remind me of The Incident's first side, albeit more "full listen" focused. Even with the long song focus in mind, the album itself isn't that long, with its 41 minutes feeling more in line with the prog of old.

But what makes The Overview stand out for me outside of its structure is how much, despite a return to less poppy progressive approach, it doesn't feel like a return to a specific Steven Wilson sound in a rehashed way that would feel like a response to the backlash of the more recent material. Pink Floyd has always been a point of reference in Wilson's music, especially in the earlier Porcupine Tree days, but this time around it's blended with the lushness of the art rock that's been explored on The Harmony Codex. The album's concept around the "overview effect" that emotionally and existentially overwhelms astronauts looking at Earth from space does translate pretty well with the album's spacey sounds, both because of how the synths offer a dash of space rock, but also because the longer form gives way to a strong ambient focus that does bring Tangerine Dream to mind at times. These two together create the kind of prog that is more interested in lush atmospheres than full throttle instrumental overload, hence why I mentioned that calling this "prog" might create the wrong expectations.

Considering how my gripes with prog acts, especially ones that have been around for a pretty long time, is that it feels like they're stuck recreating the same retro sound, often with less and less pathos as time goes on. It is quite refreshing to see an artist that has been at it for more than three decades still finding ways to make prog music that feels novel, even if it clearly lives through the influence of acts past.