Progressive rock icon Steven Wilson has confirmed that he is working on a second album with Mikael Åkerfeldt for Storm Corrosion, their collaborative project, in an interview with Innerviews.
Wilson discussed the new music and how it compares to the first Storm Corrosion record. He explained the direction the band is taking and what listeners might expect from the upcoming album.
“It’s very different, but also you will recognize the aesthetic, shall we say,” Wilson said. “I don’t wanna say too much about it, ’cause we’ve still got a long way to go on it. It’s a massive chunk of music, and it’s almost entirely played on acoustic instruments. But a lot of them.”
He drew a connection between the new Storm Corrosion material and his upcoming solo album. “We were talking earlier about my [upcoming] solo album [‘Requiem For A Village’] being a lot of it playing instruments, approaching instruments in a kind of idiot savant way,” he continued. “There’s a lot of that on Storm Corrosion as well.”
Wilson noted that reviewers had already picked up on similarities between his recent work and the Storm Corrosion sound. “It’s funny, I saw a couple of people reviewing the, the playback events we did for ‘Requiem For A Village’, and more than a few of them mentioned how it reminded them a little bit of the Storm Corrosion record — the first one, of course, they would’ve been referring to.”
He added that the new album builds on what the band created before while moving in a fresh direction. “And I think there is a little bit of that in ‘Requiem For A Village’. So it’s definitely continuing on the vocabulary that we created with the first [Storm Corrosion] record, but it’s also very different, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. And we wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
The comments come as Wilson continues to develop the second Storm Corrosion album with Åkerfeldt. Both artists have remained active with their main projects while working on this collaboration.
Storm Corrosion began when Wilson and Åkerfeldt started writing together in 2010, and they released their self-titled first album on May 8, 2012 through Roadrunner Records. The album featured a relaxed and calm atmosphere, with mellotron, almost no percussion whatsoever, creepy tremolo strings, acoustic guitars, flutes, and keyboards. Upon its release, the album was critically well received and was nominated for the Album of the Year Award by Prog and the Best Surround Sound Album award at the 2012 Grammy Awards.
After the initial release, the two returned to their respective other musical projects and took no touring or plans for future music. Twelve years later, in September 2024, Storm Corrosion was reissued via Kscope on LP, CD and Blu-ray forms with a new Dolby Atmos remix. The reissue included a bonus recording of Drag Ropes, the only song the pair has performed live, recorded when Åkerfeldt guested with Wilson and his band at London’s Royal Albert Hall in September 2015, plus extra documentary insights and footage.
According to Åkerfeldt, his and Wilson’s touring and album cycles have finally aligned again after many years. The two spoke about a second team-up while on the road in Australia at the end of 2024. Wilson’s album Requiem For A Village was released on November 6, 2024 via Fiction Records, while Åkerfeldt’s band Opeth released The Last Will and Testament on November 22, 2024, bringing their schedules back into sync.
