Steven Wilson announces new album 'Requiem For A Village'

Steven Wilson has announced details of his forthcoming ninth album. Requiem For A Village will be available on multiple formats through Fiction Records on 6th November 2026. The first track from the album ‘Requiem For A Village’ is online everywhere now.

"Swirl in a lark’s eye, sparks alive her swooping soul...

If Steven Wilson’s eighth album, The Overview, explored the depths, distances and desolations of deep space, Requiem For A Village narrows its focus to a tiny, unknown corner buried somewhere off map in the British Isles. The story that sits at the heart of Steven’s ninth album steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, settling in a village that exists beyond time and place.

In imagining a realm entirely divorced from modernity – and in creating music that willingly embraces both the macabre and the possibilities of studio mistakes – Wilson adopted a similarly unorthodox recording approach. Eschewing AI and corrective studio technologies, he turned instead to organic instrumentation, whether pristine or imperfect, embracing mistakes to see where they might lead. Recorded with regular collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman (on the tracks Requiem For A Village, Now Departing, A Basket Of Bees and Wheel) and vocalist Katherine Priddy (Murmuration), the album is intimate, ambitious, richly imaginative and knowingly eccentric, featuring a hugely compelling narration written by Andy Partridge (XTC) and voiced by one of the country’s finest actors, David Tennant.

Set in a Wicker Man landscape where the paintings of Stanley Spencer hang in the local art gallery, the stories of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood sit on the shelves of the public library, and the children of the stones play in the market square, Requiem For A Village is a sepia-toned snapshot of a hidden neverland, and a 54-minute piece of cinema for the ears.

Steven Wilson on Requiem For A Village: “I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints. Doubling down on the human gestures and flaws in the music, stuff that can’t be created using software. For example using only analogue synths with all their unpredictability, or not having instruments perfectly in tune. But it also lead to me picking up the violin, the oboe, or trying my hand on the drums – playing things I don’t really know how to play but getting something out of them that inspired me in ways I didn’t expect. Approaching the music with a sense of innocence and seeing where it took me.And where it took me was to the village.”

Following the recent teaser release of an extract from the album’s narration, the first full-length track is now online. An introduction to a lost corner of Britain, Requiem For A Village is a pummelling cluster of flying drums, a driving bassline and scratchy guitars that opens up into something close to the soundtrack for an approaching apocalypse.

Watch the Requiem For A Village (Village Session) video on YouTube here below. This film is part of a series of tracks from the album recorded live with Randy McStine and Russell Holzman.

listen HERE

watch the Requiem For A Village (Village Session) HERE

Requiem For A Village track listing:

1. Swirl In A Lark’s Eye

2. Requiem For A Village

3. The Same River Twice

4. Now Departing

5. Hiraeth

6. On Chapel Slope

7. Murmuration

8. Curcus Fingerprint

9. A Basket Of Bees

10. Great Green Map

11. Wheel

12. The Old God Is Buried

“...you will all blow away, dandelion sneeze / the hills will grow higher, with each dying breeze.”

Requiem For A Village will be available on CD, Blu-Ray, 140g two 12” black vinyl, oxblood coloured two 12” vinyl and as a boxset featuring 2 CDs, Blu-Ray disc packaged in a 96 page hardback book box. Limited amounts of signed CDs will be available through Amazon, and CDs with exclusive packaging will be available through HMV.

LIVE

As a preview for Requiem For A Village, Steven Wilson will be hosting a night at The Social in central London. Songs From The Village will be an introduction to all the music that inspired the album, a night that takes a trip into the British Isles' verdant undergrowth to a find a place where music has woven itself into the brickwork of an undiscovered village.

Please join Steven Wilson for a DJ set at The Social (5 Little Portland Street, London, W1W 7JD) on the 22nd September to hear the songs that sit beside the album’s foundation stones. Expect everything from the gauzy otherness of Boards of Canada and Demdike Stare, the haunted ragas of Third Ear Band, to the creeping dread found in British children’s TV and other broadcasts from the ’70s. All proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to charity. Click here to find out how to get tickets.

Steven Wilson will play two sold-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall (28th and 29th October) accompanied by his band, the Parallax Orchestra & Sansara choir conducted by Tom Richards, playing previously unheard orchestral arrangements of The Overview and more which have been prepared especially for these shows.