Style: Progressive rock, folk rock
Recommended for fans of: Yes, Jethro Tull, Porcupine Tree, Comus, Donovan, The Incredible String Band, Tangerine Dream
Country: UK 
Release date: November 6th 2026 

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From pagan rituals in The Wicker Man (1973) to the murderous parochialism of the parish council in Hot Fuzz (2007), the close-knit, cult-like communities of rural England are a staple of British folk horror. And Steven Wilson’s ninth solo album, named for David Gladwell’s obscure 1975 arthouse film Requiem for a Village, is steeped in this tradition. Indeed, the video for single “On Chapel Slope” restages the most iconic scene in Gladwell’s film in which the elderly groundskeeper of the cemetery witnesses the dead rise from their graves dressed in Sunday best. When he follows them into the church, he finds himself young again on the day of his wedding. Gladwell’s hauntological work juxtaposes the dying old ways of the Suffolk countryside with the increasing industrialisation of the world, finding both bucolia as well as strands of domestic horror.

Wilson’s Requiem for a Village finds itself drawing on the brooding experimental melancholy of past works Grace for Drowning and Storm Corrosion, sprinkles in some of Deadwing’s dynamism, a soupçon of The Harmony Codex’s synths, and then puts a new spin on the whole formula by reaching back to folkier influences such as Comus and Donovan. Microtonal acoustic guitars thread many tracks in webs of dread, actor David Tennant narrates spooky couplets written by XTC’s Andy Partridge, and sounds from Wilson’s seventies childhood—church bells on foggy mornings, the warbling synths of psychedelic children’s TV shows—bead the album in uncanny nostalgia. Wilson’s ghostly village of yore is rooted in the ruins of his own youth¹.

Between snippets of Tennant’s narration, chiming synths, spooky echoing vocals, and eerie intervals dominate. Few songs go by without an introduction, coda, or some sort of structural interspersion as songs fragment into a heap of broken images. Lowing synths and plunging guitar bends interrupt almost at random; nightmarish punctuations in the rose-tinted facade (“Murmuration”, “Cursus Fingerprint”). Requiem for a Village veers stylistically between a familiar vein of energetic prog rock that Wilson has frequently mined and the more overtly creepy influences of folk and synth. The title track is something of a departure with its “People Who Eat Darkness” style staccato riffage, energetic noise rock guitar solos, and Russell Holzman’s precision drum volleys. But even this track ebbs into an outro of reverb-laden falsetto over a restrained beat, as though the idyll of the throwback rock is suddenly dampened by repressed bitternesses rising to the fore. It’s as if Wilson’s telling the audience, ‘Don’t get used to all these rock shenanigans, things are about to get weird.’

“On Chapel Slope” largely centres around a clean bluesy riff and Wilson’s vocals over an electronic pulse before a chant of ‘you’ll stay with us as stones, evermore’ swells up like a skeletal hand beckoning from a grave. The often fragmentary nature of the album is happens on the riff scale of “A Basket of Bees”, which is otherwise one consummate idea fully explored, with the acoustic arpeggios feel like they almost trip over one another in their staccato triplet feel. Some of the shorter tracks function like ever-so-short stories, such as the ghostly ditty on “The Same River” which grows into Tangerine Dream-esque synth swells before Tennant’s menacing register returns. On “Cursus Fingerprint”, the actor is modified by nursery rhyme chimes and childish instruments, an anti-Brian Cant descending on Trumpton with malign intent. Partridge’s evocation of an England of yore draws on the effervescent language of Welsh modernist poet Dylan Thomas, particularly his play Under Milk Wood, which gives voice to the dreams and dark thoughts of the inhabitants of a Welsh fishing village. Narration is an element that rarely works for me in music (or in films, for that matter), but Tennant’s expert delivery of Partridge’s stanzas is Vincent Price on “Thriller” stripped of the camp, leaving only unclear threat. He fits into the strange world seamlessly.

“Now Departing” best embodies the fragmented strangeness and duelling personalities of Requiem for a Village, whiplashing back and forth between whispery verses and diminished piano arpeggios, heart-pulsating stomp percussion, and groovy rock riffs. Strange synthetic embellishments and a plethora of instrumental layers accumulate in places, like bones and pottery jutting out of the song’s strata. A neutral, overdriven voice intones the song’s title in the chorus like a sudden auditory hallucination on an abandoned platform. It’s one of Wilson’s oddest songs, but its disparate pieces somehow fit together—a tapestry of trepidation, like the ghost story collections you trot out as the nights draw in and the rot of leaves permeates the nostrils. 

Wilson and Randy McStine utilise a wide array of instruments throughout the album, many familiar from the folk rock world, and usually employed as textural elements buried like so much archaeological detritus—toy piano, accordion, melodica, harmonium, recorder, lyre, autoharp, oboe. A wealth of synthesisers and pianos such as Wurlitzers and Mellotrons provide the atmospheric and electronic counterweight. Naturally, the ambient influences like Boards of Canada and Brian Eno bring their own hauntological gloss to the seventies village dreamscape, the technological promise of the decade rendered anachronistic by time. Needless to say, with Wilson producing, all these layers and textures are clean, crisp, and never muddy one another, with the mix highlighting those ominous thrums or stabs of synth with an ear towards horror film soundtracks². And yet there’s an unexpected rawness here, born of Wilson’s desire to not overpolish a work that inhabits dusty nooks and darkened crannies. 

None of this is to say that Requiem for a Village is a perfect record. If anything, I’m more interested in it because it’s flawed. The fragmented nature of the disparate genres and jarring transitions, oddly, aren’t a problem for me. The sum of my critique is that “Hiraeth” is largely pointless, and that I remain agnostic on the disjointed arpeggiation of “A Basket of Bees”. Some of the riffs, particularly those later in “A Basket of Bees” and “Requiem for a Village”, feel a little too similar to one another in their ill-defined, noodly ethos. A few of the songs feel like they should be merged into one, particularly the closing trio on which I have Thoughts To Come. Wilson’s singing isn’t always at its best, with punky shouts and some slightly strained falsetto (“Murmuration” in particular), leading one to wonder what old collaborators like Nina Tayeb are up to these days. But more than anything, I find the album a little breathless with some of the best ideas underexplored—I’d love to spend more time with the horror addendum of “On Chapel Slope”, for instance, and “Hireath” could win me over if it developed further. Not everyone will want to spend more time in Requiem for a Village’s otherworldly neighbourhood, but I do. 

The three-track finale largely works as a single suite, with “Great Green Map” proving a chiming, charming folktale segueing into the frequently stank-face-inducing jams and solos of “Wheel” before settling on the Tennant-led coda of “The Old God is Buried”. The first of the three tracks speaks of using the titular map to find a mystical village where everything’s as it was in yesteryear: 

‘The village is near and it’s always been here, like a whisper of smoke / it fades and regroups like a film on a loop, all the rings through an oak / while the Romans still march, and the wash girls still starch, and the Isles rule.’

But in the second half of the track, diminished arpeggios and microtonal guitar loom like black dogs over the former idyll as a reprise from “Now Departing” returns and reveals the true nature of the village’s bargain:

‘‘You might get on a train, but you’ll never escape / ‘cause all destinations end here / It’s absurd to believe that when you try to leave / the train will just bring you back here’. 

You could read this as the ironic ending to the ghost story, an adventure to a mythic village ending with imprisonment in the past, or the villagers who don’t buy into the eternal olden time being unable to escape. But these lines have more immediate weight in modern England. When so many seek respite from the present by returning to some sentimental bygone age, it’s hard not to see Requiem for a Village as a darker cultural critique. Trains have, after all, long stood as Wilson’s main metaphor for the past, but here he seems to suggest that the train doesn’t run anymore—Richard Beeching closed the stations you’re looking for³. The dead are gone but they beckon to the living with falsehoods about the idyll of yore. “The Old God is Buried” closes the record with another reprise of that beckoning refrain from “On Chapel Slope”: ‘you’ll stay with us as stones, evermore’—shorn of its seductions, this is the only promise that nostalgia will keep. 

As a serial supporter of the weirdo entry in many an artist’s catalogue (Watershed, Ki, Asymmetry, Magma), and as a fan of folk rock and folk horror, I’m perhaps a little biased. Requiem for a Village is an eclectic and experimental foray that won’t work for all of Wilson’s fans; it’s more like three seventies albums broken into shards and then pieced back together via kintsugi with a golden glue of hauntology—a niche prospect, at best. For me, it’s a record found in the totality of its thematic vision rather than the various instrumental breakages that embody its sound. It speaks to an England that has haunted me even as I haunt it, and I have to assume that fidelity is lost as you venture further outside this spectred isle’s borders—a perfect foil to The Overview’s universalism. Is Requiem for a Village the soundtrack to an imagined arthouse folk-horror? An ironic critique of progressive rock’s autophagic tendency to repeatedly rob from the past in the hopes of finding something new to say? A commentary on the well of nostalgia that modern culture keeps hopelessly returning to? Perhaps it’s all those things and none. You are now entering the village. You can never leave. 

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Recommended tracks: Great Green Map/Wheel/The Old God is Buried, On Chapel Slope, Now Departing
You may also like: Storm Corrosion, Pure Reason Revolution
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Fiction Records

Steven Wilson is:
– Steven Wilson – production, mixing (all tracks); keyboards (tracks 1–7, 9–12), percussion (1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12), synthesizer (1, 4, 6, 7, 11), harmonium (1, 7, 8), acoustic guitar (1, 7, 9–11), autoharp (1, 7, 9, 11), piano (2–11), Mellotron (2–5, 8–10), lead vocals (2–4, 6–11), bass guitar (2, 4–7, 9–11), guitars (2, 4, 8); lyre, oboe (2); glockenspiel (3, 8, 10), nylon-string guitar (4, 8), electric piano (4, 9), drums (6–8, 11), violin (6, 7, 12), chant vocals (6, 12); melodica, recorder (6); Wurlitzer (7, 9, 11), banjo (7), harp (8), electric guitar (9, 11), horn (10), drum machine (12)
– Randy McStine – co-production (all tracks), synthesizer (2, 4, 5, 11), background vocals (2, 4, 7, 9, 11), Mellotron (2, 4, 11), guitars (2, 8, 12), lyre (2, 7), accordion (4, 5), percussion (4, 6, 7, 9), electric guitar (4, 7, 10, 11), toy piano (4, 11), keyboards (4), slide guitar (5), acoustic guitar (6, 7, 10), chant vocals (6, 12); bass drum, cymbals, electric piano, theremin (7); 12-string electric guitar, 6-string guitar (9); drums, vocals (10)
– David Tennant – narration (1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12)
– Russell Holzman – drums (2, 4, 9, 11)
– Adam Holzman – keyboards (4)
– Katherine Priddy – harp (7)
– Lee Harris – guitars (8)

1. At the age of 59, Wilson still looks like he’s in his early forties. Maybe it’s a Picture of a Dorian Gray thing but instead of a painting absorbing sin, Wilson’s music is forced to draw on weirder seventies influences, which I’m totally fine with. ↩︎
2. Random sounds and moments put me in mind of such film soundtracks as The Wicker Man (1973), Under the Skin (2013), Annihilation (2018), and The Thing (1982). ↩︎
3. Naturally, the man tasked with closing rail lines that were no longer of use assessed whether they were essential routes or not by riding them in the early afternoon when no one was using them. ↩︎