Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex (2LP)

THE HARMONY CODEX - the seventh album by Steven Wilson - takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you.

Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career that’s spanned more than three decades both as a band leader and as a solo artist, it represents the apotheosis of a life spent fully absorbed in music. While The Harmony Codex nods to records from Steven Wilson’s recent past, at times echoing the paranoid rumble of 2008’s Insurgentes, the crystalline electronics of 2021’s The Future Bites and the expansive storytelling of 2013’s The Raven That Refused To Sing (and Other Stories), here he has managed to create something entirely unique, a record that exists outside of the notion of genre. And although The Harmony Codex is a record made with spatial audio in mind, it’s not one that needs an elaborate sound system to lift you out of body - two speakers and an open mind will do just fine.

Steven Wilson is a singular talent, an artist/producer, his last album - 2021’s The Future Bites - charted at No 4 in the UK and was nominated for 2 Grammys. He is the founding member of Porcupine Tree, whose last album (2022’s Closure/Continuation) charted at No 2.  Steven has also received multiple Grammy nominations for his spatial audio work, having recently remixed artists such as Chic, King Crimson, ABC, Roxy Music, A Ha, Suede, Tears for Fears and Guns N’ Roses.

1. Inclination

2. What Life Brings

3. Economies of Scale

4. Impossible Tightrope

5. Rock Bottom

6. Beautiful Scarecrow

7. The Harmony Codex

8. Time Is Running Out

9. Actual Brutal Facts

10. Staircase