Style: Progressive rock, alternative rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Airbag, Radiohead, Anathema, Steven Wilson
Country: UK
Release date: 9 October 2026

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For twenty-seven years and sixteen albums now, The Pineapple Thief have been churning out progressive rock albums to a considerable degree of success. And for twenty-seven years and sixteen albums, I have managed to never really engage with them. Aborted attempts to get into Your Wilderness and It Leads to This are all I can cite when it comes to my engagement with the British group’s long-running career. But this is a prog blog, and as a Steven Wilson/Porcupine Tree acolyte, I felt I owed it to the veteran progressive alt rock group to give them the old college try. 

Indeed, stylistically, between the vocals of frontman Bruce Soord and the restrained alternative rock tendencies, The Pineapple Thief’s nearest relatives are Steven Wilson and Radiohead. The main 5/4 riff of opener “New World Order” is a catchy groove, and follow-up “Hold the Ashes” has a compelling hook and a beat you can bob your head to. And while there’s plenty to like across the album, from the pacey outro of “God Knows” or post-rock build of “Scattering Like Flies” to the active instrumentality of “Through the Noise”, Far and Wide’s most consistent trait is how undercooked the tracks feel. Many end with a dynamic outro (“God Knows”, “This Empty Space”) or climax in an interesting mid-section instrumental (“Hold the Ashes”, “Scattering Like Flies”), yet in every single instance these ideas feel like they’re building to something only for the song to either return to familiarly meek hooks or end outright. 

And so we have to grapple with the contradiction of The Pineapple Thief on their sixteenth album. On the one hand, this is a veteran band who know how to compose a rock song with a hook, can boast one of the most engagingly nuanced drummers in the biz, and sport immaculate production. On the other hand, Far and Wide is unavoidably boring. From frontman Bruce Soord’s soporific performance to cookie-cutter instrumentation from everyone except drummer Gavin Harrison, the most fascinating thing about this record is its antimemetic properties. Like walking into a room after the age of thirty, Far and Wide feels like it had a purpose but promptly forgot it and just trod compositional water, delivering an album that never attempts to distinguish itself. One could argue that The Pineapple Thief simply aren’t looking to make a flashy, grandiose record, and I accept that; not every album needs to be some grand conceptual masterpiece. But Far and Wide’s subtlety doesn’t betray hidden depths. The lyrics are banal abstractions of generic feelings while the songs nod to progressive rock but seemingly have no desire to explore their own possibilities. For all Harrison’s efforts, a drummer alone cannot enliven an album this meekly lifeless. The Pineapple Thief seem content to toss out an album that feels like it was written to meet a contractual obligation. 

And that’s not to say that Far and Wide is bad. No one’s going to spin this album and go “oh my god, this is awful” because it isn’t (with the exception, perhaps, of “Who Wants It?” which has irritating, repetitive vocal lines). It’s simply so shorn of creativity or effort as to be wholly unremarkable. At their best, The Pineapple Thief throw us “Scattering Like Flies”, which has some tense synth work and dynamically switches between its more understated alt rock verse and more expansive instrumental sections with evocative guitar work over Harrison’s ever-shifting drum patterns. If you heard this track on the radio, you might be optimistic to check out the full record, but you’d likely be disappointed by the gutlessness of the rest of the album. 

As we close, it’s worth mentioning again that this is The Pineapple Thief’s sixteenth album. Not many bands can stay fresh across that many releases, and there’s always potential to rally into a late renaissance—see Judas Priest, or Devin Townsend on more than one occasion. But, more to the point, The Pineapple Thief have never taken more than two years to write an album and, listening to Far and Wide, you start to wonder if maybe they should take longer. Because there are outlines here suggestive of more interesting ideas to come. The chief problem is that Far and Wide feels like an outline from a band who, during the writing process, looked neither far nor wide. 

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Recommended tracks: Scattering Like Flies, Through the Noise
You may also like: Hamasaari, Dim Gray, Esthesis
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: InsideOutMusic

The Pineapple Thief is:
– Bruce Soord (vocals, lead guitar)
– Gavin Harrison (drums)
– Steve Kitch (synthesisers, keyboards)
– Jon Sykes (bass, backing vocals)