2025 Number 5: Steven Wilson

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 5: Steven Wilson - The Overview

Every two years, like clockwork, Steven Wilson gives us a new album. And every two years, like clockwork, the fans and lapsed fans get a new puzzle to solve. How the heck are we going to interpret this one? How does it fit into his wide discography? How well does it make good on his galaxy-sized talent? How arrogant can he afford to be for the coming two years? And how well does it wash the taste of The Future Bites out of our mouths?

After the long, expansive, alienating Harmony Codex, he has now presented us with an album built like an old LP, with two side-filling suites. His Misplaced Childhood, his Thick as a Brick? If you expect that modest 40-minute running time to mean a pointy, wordy, song-based album like the previous examples, you got Wilson’d. Quite a lot of this is instrumental, experimental and often ambient. It’s very much in the vein of Harmoy Codex, though more consistent and easier to digest.

Meant to invoke the existential loneliness of the astronaut who contemplates his insignificance when confronted with the terrifying vastness of space, The Overview is haunting and melancholy. There are also elements of witty irony, thanks to XTC’s Andy Partridge’s lyrics. His contribution to the first suite ends up being the heart of the whole album, the wry human touch that counterpoints Wilson himself, who drifts ever further into space like a latter day Major Tom.

The album has an otherworldly beauty to it that works very well with its own existentialist concept. There’s aslo many great, exciting musical passages in here that please the old proghead in me. I’m very comfortable calling this my favourite of his since the underrated To The Bone. That was a very grounded album, and I’m ready for Wilson to come back down to earth again. I can’t deny that these days his albums seem more meant to analyze and scrutinize than to simply enjoy. But I likewise can’t deny his output is always unpredictable and exciting.