The dystopian present of Steven Wilson's The Future Bites arrived much earlier than anyone expected.

COVID-19, lockdown and all the complications therein came storming across the globe a few months before The Future Bites was slated to arrive. With touring cancelled and most of the world stuck at home, Steven had to decide whether 2020 was the right time to release an album that deals largely with the paradox of our reliance on technology.

Steven has been drawn to this theme, going back to his time in legendary U.K. prog rock outfit Porcupine Tree, but he's never explored it quite so forcefully as on The Future Bites. So he decided to wait.

The album release was pushed back to this past January, mostly in hopes that the pandemic would have long been over by now and we'd be back to some sense of normal. Steven tells Q104.3 New York's QN'A that he believes the decision was ultimately the right one. The album, while his most musically accessible, is lyrically one of his darkest and most timely — perhaps too timely.

"I’m not sure if people wanted [this album] when the whole idea of the pandemic and lockdown was so raw and so fresh in everyone’s mind," he said. "We were still becoming used to the idea of living in a world like that. I think, for better or worse, we are now a bit better accustomed to the idea of living in this new kind of crazy world that we live in."

It's a new world that has long since taken over the music industry, from the way we consume music to the way we produce it. As Wilson considered these concepts, the prevalence of electronic sounds on Future Bites was no accident, even if it wasn't what some longtime fans were hoping for.

But Wilson — also renowned for his stereo remixes of classic rock and pop albums — has been working on his own terms for too long to be concerned about hubbub over a change in his musical direction.

"It’s been interesting to see how it’s kind of divided people in that sense. I take that as a good sign; I take that as kind of a badge of honor," he explained. "The one thing that I think is most important this days, when there’s more music coming out than any other time in history — and arguably too much music coming out — is that people actually talk about your music and it gets people engaged."

Read the full QN'A with Steven Wilson below!

For tour dates and more information on Future Bites, go here, or follow Steven Wilson on Instagram.

Photo: Andrew Hobbs

Mark Manuel

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