Steven Wilson has confirmed he has started work with Opeth‘s Mikael Åkerfeldt on a second Storm Corrosion album, the follow-up to the duo’s 2012 debut. He made the comments in an interview with Anil Prasad, creator of Innerviews.
“It’s almost entirely played on acoustic instruments,” Wilson revealed. “It’s very different, but also you will recognize the aesthetic, shall we say.” He declined to go further: “I don’t wanna say too much about it, ’cause we’ve still got a long way to go on it.” No release date, title or label has been announced.
The confirmation comes five years after Wilson first floated the idea. In February 2021 he told Prog magazine that the debut’s remix could be “good time to do another record,” while acknowledging the problem of distance: “We can’t just get together on Tuesday nights and jam and we don’t want to do it by email.” At the time he added: “I like to think we’ll do it eventually.”
A Record “Strange in the Best Way Possible”
The pair’s working relationship predated the project: Wilson produced Opeth’s ‘Blackwater Park’, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Damnation’. For Storm Corrosion, they spent a week in 2011 at Wilson’s studio with the aim of avoiding “the obvious,” completing the album that September after more than a year of writing. Åkerfeldt handled guitars and Wilson keyboards and arrangements, while Porcupine Tree‘s Gavin Harrison played drums on a small portion of the material.
‘Storm Corrosion’ was released in May 2012 on Roadrunner Records. Its psychedelic chamber folk, with influences ranging from German krautrock to Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Scott Walker, sold 9,400 copies in its first week in the U.S., debuting at No. 47 on the Billboard 200, and reached No. 45 in the U.K. Wilson described it as completing a trilogy with Opeth’s ‘Heritage’ (2011) and his own solo album ‘Grace for Drowning’ (2011).
In September 2024, Kscope reissued it with a new Dolby Atmos mix by Wilson and a bonus track, ‘Drag Ropes’, the only song the duo has ever performed live, at a 2015 Wilson show at the Royal Albert Hall with Åkerfeldt as a guest. “It remains one of my favorite releases in my whole catalogue,” Wilson said at the time. Åkerfeldt called it one of the few records of his own he can listen to as a fan: “Everything about this record is strange in the best way possible.”
From ‘Requiem for a Village’ to Porcupine Tree
The news arrives just ahead of Wilson’s ninth solo album, ‘Requiem for a Village’, due November 6 via Fiction Records. Wilson said that among the reviewers at its playback events, “more than a few of them mentioned how it reminded them a little bit of the Storm Corrosion record.” The album, which follows ‘The Overview’ (2025), is set in a fictional village in the British Isles, features narration written by XTC‘s Andy Partridge and voiced by actor David Tennant, and was recorded without corrective studio tools or AI.
Wilson will premiere it on October 28 and 29 at London’s Royal Albert Hall, both sold out, accompanied by the Parallax Orchestra and SANSARA choir. Randy McStine, Russell Holzman and Katherine Priddy appear on the record, and more live dates are set to be announced.
In the interview, Wilson also discussed his other long-running partnerships, with Tim Bowness in No-Man and with Richard Barbieri and Harrison in Porcupine Tree. “I think that that’s one of the things I love most about my career now, is there is no careerism involved in my career,” he said.