Steven Wilson sets Requiem For A Village for November and shares its title song

Steven Wilson has dated his next album and released the song it takes its name from. Requiem For A Village arrives on 6 November through Fiction Records, and the title track went out with the announcement on 21 September.

The record is being presented as a deliberate refusal. According to the press material, Wilson kept AI and corrective studio technology out of the process entirely, and built the album from live, organic playing with the mistakes left in. Analogue synths were used precisely because they drift; instruments were left slightly out of tune on purpose.

"I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints," Wilson said of the approach, describing a decision to lean into human gesture and flaw rather than software. He also picked up instruments he has no real command of, including violin, oboe and drums, on the theory that playing something badly produces ideas that playing it well does not.

That method sits oddly against his day job. Wilson has spent since 2009 remixing classic albums into spatial audio, work that depends on exactly the kind of studio precision this record sets aside. His catalogue of that work runs through Tears For Fears, ABC, Chic, Ultravox, Suede, The Who, Van Morrison and Manic Street Preachers.

The album also has a voice on it that is not his. Andy Partridge of XTC wrote narration for the record, and David Tennant reads it. The tracklist runs to twelve pieces: Swirl In A Lark's Eye, Requiem For A Village, The Same River Twice, Now Departing, Hiraeth, On Chapel Slope, Murmuration, Curcus Fingerprint, A Basket Of Bees, Great Green Map, Wheel and The Old God Is Buried.

Wilson summed the method up in one line, saying he approached the music with a sense of innocence and followed it, and that where it took him was to the village.

The record follows The Overview, his eighth studio album, which came out last year and was built around the Overview Effect, the shift in perspective astronauts describe on first seeing Earth from space. A rural English requiem is a long way from that, which is roughly the point.

The former Porcupine Tree songwriter has spent two decades moving between progressive rock, electronic pop and archival work without settling in any of them, and Requiem For A Village reads as another lateral move rather than a return to a previous position.

Requiem For A Village is out on 6 November. Releases dated for the same stretch are on the release calendar, and more rock coverage sits on our genre hub.