Steven Wilson has revealed his new “very strange” album is “nearly finished”, just weeks after he launched an online platform dedicated to immersive sound.
The cult singer-songwriter released his eighth studio album ‘The Overview’ last year, a record inspired by the Overview Effect, the phenomenon experienced by astronauts when they first view Earth from outer space.
Now, in a new interview with the YouTube channel Immersive Audio Album, Wilson has confirmed that the follow-up album is nearly complete.
“Yeah, it’s almost finished, actually,” he said (transcribed by Blabbermouth). “It’s a very strange record. It’s a complete opposite of ‘The Overview’, which was a very lush, very big record and also about a very large — well, the largest possible subject matter you can imagine, literally the cosmos as we know it. This is a much more insular record.”
Wilson continued: “It’s still very conceptual. It’s still very experimental and the pieces are — well, it feels like another single piece of music to me, in that sense. But it’s much more angular and experimental in a way that I’m really excited about. And that’s all I can really say at the moment. Very different again, yeah.”
Earlier this month, the former Porcupine Tree musician launched Headphone Dust, an online platform that offers his albums in high-resolution, 5.1 and Atmos/spatial audio editions.
Among the available items are Dolby Atmos remixes of Wilson’s 2013 album ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing’, as well as ‘The Overview’, and there is also an exclusive release of ‘Impossible Tightrope: Live In Madrid’, from the final night of his 2025 European tour. Browse the Headphone Dust store here.
He spoke about his approach to studio production in the aforementioned interview. “The way I make records is, by definition, pretty layered,” he explained. “I love the possibilities of the studio. I love overdubbing. Now on this particular new record I’m making, there’s a lot of what I would call sound design elements. Now, that’s not to say they haven’t been on all my records, but let’s just say I’ve taken it to another level on this record.”
“There’s a lot of sound design. There’s a lot of sound effects that kind of place you in a particular place and a particular feeling. And there’s a lot of use of lo-fi sounds as well, keeping things sometimes in mono… But I’m making a lot of decisions on this album to keep things very small and mono, but also knowing that those things can be just as impressive in surround because you’ve got something very small and mono. You can place it very discretely in a particular place in the room.”
Wilson began remixing classic albums back in 2009 and has since created spatial audio reinterpretations of records by Tears For Fears, ABC, Chic, Ultravox, Suede, The Who, and Van Morrison.
Last year, he revealed that the work he did on the Guns N’ Roses albums ‘Use Your Illusion I’ and ‘Use Your Illusion II’ wasn’t popular with the band, and was shelved despite being a full remix of nearly 40 songs, including outtakes and B-sides.
Wilson also spoke to NME last year about his dedication to spatial audio. “Atmos sound has nothing below you, and you could have speakers underneath,” he said. “But the big innovation won’t necessarily be in expanding spatial. I think it’s how to bring it into a live context. Right now, it’s tricky, as you need a week to acoustically calibrate and tune it, and that’s not practical when you play a new city every night. But it’s interesting to see more venues having spatial audio already installed, like The Sphere in Las Vegas.”
“If more venues do that, it gives artists chance to tour a more immersive show. I hope that will be a big progress over the next few years.”
