Buckle up and prepare to be taken on the ride of a lifetime. Steven Wilson is back with The Overview, an album that even he admits is prog. Comprising two tracks, the conceptual suite includes lyrics from XTC’s Andy Partridge and visuals that are out of this world. Prog visits the musician at home to get the lowdown.

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“People who like more progressive, more conceptual rock music, they’re much more open-minded than they perhaps they even might give themselves credit for sometimes.”

There’s a phenomenon that affects astronauts when they travel into space and look back at the Earth. It’s called The Overview Effect.

“It’s reportedly a cognitive shift that occurs that’s to do with perspective and how they feel about their lives,” says Steven Wilson, a man who hasn’t been into space yet but has thought about The Overview Effect a lot over the last couple of years. “A mental perspective –quite literally having an overview of where we fit in time and space, or some inkling of it, and understanding in a split second of just how insignificant we are.”

The Overview Effect affects different people in different ways. When actor William Shatner travelled into space onboard Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin shuttle in 2021 at the age of 90, the former Captain Kirk had an overwhelmingly negative reaction.

“He said he’d expect to feel this sense of euphoria, but all he felt when he looked back at the Earth was a sense of death and nothingness,” says Wilson, as we sit at right angles on a pair of sofas in the open-plan kitchen of his north London home. “Isn’t that funny? Of all the people.”

Others have found beauty or even comfort in something that only emphasises our ultimately insignificant place in an unmeasurable, potentially infinite universe. Steven Wilson can understand this.

“Your life is futile, it’s meaningless, and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” he says with more relish than it probably warrants. “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.”

The idea informs Wilson’s new solo album, tellingly titled The Overview. Across its two lengthy tracks –one 23 minutes, the other 18 –it makes a dizzying, dazzling journey from the surface of the Earth to the most distant reaches of the universe. Musically, it’s the most recognisably ‘prog’ album Wilson has made since 2014’s The Raven That Refused To Sing, even if it shares little with that record’s self-conscious homage to vintage prog, instead offering a much more contemporary version of the genre.

“This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock,” he says wryly at one point.

Conceptually, it’s even more ambitious. It starts with an encounter with an alien on some unnamed moor and ends billions of light years away on the very edge of the universe, taking in everyday dramas on the streets of Swindon, the destruction of Earth and such vast cosmic phenomenon such as the Omega Centauri, the Andromeda galaxy and the Eridanus supervoid. It’s an album about the rise of social media and the death of curiosity, about the existential futility and beauty of human life. But mostly it’s about perspective. As Wilson puts it: “Sometimes being reminded how insignificant you really are in terms of time and space can create a sense of perspective, in a positive way as well as a negative way.”

Prog has already heard The Overview through headphones ahead of arriving at Wilson’s house. But before we sit down for the interview, he invites us through to his home studio to listen to it through the ultra-high-end equipment he uses in his capacity as both a musician and one of the most in-demand Atmos remixers around. Here, sitting in a high-backed chair, bathed in unearthly wall-mounted mood lights, a screen flickering with lines and numbers before us as The Overview bounces around the room like it’s alive, it feels like we’re on the deck of a spaceship.

It’s an album of two parts and two personalities. The first, Objects Outlive Us (“The human story,” as Wilson describes it), is detailed and protean, a suite of music that shifts from acoustic passages to warm electronics, capped by an all-time-great solo from guitarist and regular Wilson collaborator Randy McStine.