Genre: Progressive Rock, Instrumental

Steve Rothery grew up in Whitby, on England’s northeast coast, and he has described what winters there actually sounded like: the roaring of the waves during stormy weather, loud enough to hear from indoors, evocative enough to still be shaping his music five decades later. The Roaring Waves, released August 28, 2026 via InsideOut Music, his long-awaited collaboration with Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, takes that specific childhood sound and builds seven instrumental tracks around it. This is not an album about the sea in the abstract. It is an album about one person’s actual memory of it, filtered through a friendship eight years in the making.

That timeline matters more than most album gestation stories, because it is the emotional key to what The Roaring Waves actually is. Hackett and Rothery first agreed to make a record together roughly twelve years ago, started laying down sketches at Hackett’s Racket Club eight years ago, and let the project sit, unfinished, through both musicians’ individual careers, tours, and solo albums, until it was finally ready. Hackett has said plainly that the album exists because the friendship came first and the music followed, not the other way around, and that ordering shows up directly in how the two guitarists actually play against each other here.

What Two Guitarists Chose Not to Prove

There is an obvious version of this record that neither man made. Two guitarists this decorated, Hackett’s tenure defining Genesis records from Nursery Cryme through Wind and Wuthering, Rothery the longest-serving original member of Marillion, could easily have built an album around technical display, each player answering the other’s virtuosity with more of the same. The Roaring Waves does not do this, and the restraint is the whole point. Hackett has described the sessions as old school, mates in a garage playing and hanging out rather than a formal writing process, and that description is audible in how unhurried the record actually sounds. Nobody here is proving anything to anybody.

The Black Sea, the album’s lead track, makes the emotional stakes explicit through structure rather than statement. It opens on surface noise before either guitar enters, a deliberate acknowledgment of texture and atmosphere before melody, and the two players spend the rest of the track in genuine conversation rather than competition, phrases handed back and forth rather than stacked on top of each other. Sandsend, named for a village a few miles from Whitby itself, is the clearest single piece of evidence that this record is Rothery’s memory as much as it is a joint composition, gentler and more melodically direct than anything on a typical Marillion record, closer to a lullaby remembered from a specific coastline than to a prog set piece.

Why Red Dragon Is the Album’s Emotional Center

Red Dragon, the album’s third track, is where The Roaring Waves earns its instrumental ambition rather than simply displaying it. The piece moves through the kind of extended, shifting structure both men built careers on, sections that would read as indulgent on a lesser record, but the emotional throughline never gets lost inside the architecture, which is the actual achievement here. Mixed by Riccardo Romano and mastered at half-speed at Abbey Road by Miles Showell, the record’s sonic clarity gives every one of those structural turns room to actually be heard rather than blurred together, and that clarity matters specifically because the album’s argument depends on a listener being able to follow two distinct emotional voices through a single extended piece rather than one dominant voice with support.

It is worth naming precisely what kind of first this actually is, since the record’s own marketing leans on the word. Rothery has guested on Hackett’s own solo and re-recording projects three times before, in 2012, 2018, and again in 2024. The Roaring Waves is not the first time these two men have played together. It is the first time they have made something as genuine equals, co-credited, co-written, neither man a guest in the other’s house. That distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between a favour and a friendship finally given the space it was owed.

What survives across all seven tracks, K-129 through the eventual title cut, is a record more interested in memory and feeling than in demonstration, built by two men who spent over a decade making sure the friendship stayed intact before they let the music prove anything at all. It did not need to prove much. It needed to sound like Whitby in a storm, half-remembered and still audible indoors. It does.

Buy the album on Bandcamp: https://insideoutmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-roaring-waves-24-bit-hd-audio

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