Progressive Rock
Steven Wilson announced his ninth solo album, «Requiem for a Village», on 11 September; it’s out 6 November via Fiction Records. The same day he released the title track and the first video from The Village Hall Sessions, a series of studio live sessions of which, so far, only this track, played as a trio, has been released.
It was filmed at Sensible Music studio, with Wilson on vocals, guitars, synths and piano, Randy McStine on guitars and backing vocals, and Russell Holzman on drums and percussion. It was recorded by Shelby Logan Warne and directed by Miles Skarin.
The record is twelve tracks and fifty-four minutes: «Swirl in a Lark’s Eye», «Requiem for a Village», «The Same River Twice», «Now Departing», «Hiraeth», «On Chapel Slope», «Murmuration», «Cursus Fingerprint», «A Basket of Bees», «Great Green Map», «Wheel» and «The Old God Is Buried».
The narration threading it together was written by Andy Partridge, of XTC, who also co-wrote some of the lyrics, and it’s read by actor David Tennant; Katherine Priddy also sings on it. It’ll be released on CD, Blu-ray, double black vinyl and oxblood vinyl, and as a box set with two CDs and the Blu-ray inside a ninety-six-page hardback book.
Wilson explains he’s steered clear of artificial intelligence and studio correction, that he leaned on acoustic instruments and analogue synthesizers «with all their unpredictability», and that he left some instruments deliberately out of tune. He plays violin, oboe and drums himself on it, none of which he’s actually good at. «I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical fingerprints,» he says, adding that he wanted to insist on human gestures and flaws rather than manufacture them with software.
The label’s press release places the record in a corner off the map of the British Isles, a village untouched by modernity, with Stanley Spencer’s paintings in the local art gallery, the stories of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood in the library, and the children of the stones playing in the market square. The announcement comes with requiemforavillage.com, a parish-council-style website with nineties design: a noticeboard, bin collection dates, roadworks, a hall-booking form and the listing for a 1999 talk on electronic voice phenomena. The village’s autumn festival is listed for 6 November.
The title matches that of a 1975 British film directed by David Gladwell, shot in Suffolk villages with residents of Witnesham and Metfield, in which an old man recalls his village’s rural past amid long shots of the English countryside and sequences of the dead rising from their graves. The press release doesn’t mention it.
The record follows «The Overview» (2025) and continues a solo career that began with «Insurgentes» (2008) and has gone through «Grace for Drowning» (2011), «The Raven That Refused to Sing» (2013), «Hand. Cannot. Erase.» (2015), «To the Bone» (2017), «The Future Bites» (2021) and «The Harmony Codex» (2023).
Before it comes out, Wilson has two dates lined up: on 22 September he DJs at The Social in London, a session titled «Songs from the Village» in aid of the charity Here 2 Belong, and on 28 and 29 October he plays two shows at the Royal Albert Hall with the Parallax Orchestra and choir, premiering arrangements of «The Overview» made for the occasion by Simon Dobson. They’re his only live dates of 2026, and neither is in Spain.
Text by Guillem Cardós