Steve Hogarth updates on "rich, upbeat" new Marillion album

Marillion singer Steve Hogarth has been updating fans on the band's forthcoming album An Hour Before It's Dark.

The band recently announced the title of their upcoming nineteenth studio album, with one lucky fan who guessed the title from a simple acronym winning tickets to every gig on the band's upcoming A Light At The End Of The Tunnel tour.

"It would seem that much of the foreboding in our last album FEAR turned out to be well-founded," says Hogarth. "For this one I set out to avoid writing about the pandemic at all costs because I thought every other artist would be. When push came to shove though, it was impossible not to reference it. It has become part of life so there’s no ignoring it creatively just as there’s no ignoring it, period.

"However, the pandemic isn’t our biggest problem, the mass extinction and the climate-gone-mad is where we really need to blow our economies - personal and national. We’re going to have to save the earth whether we’re hippies or billionaires. That’s got to be our number one priority. We’re gonna have to be hard on ourselves. It was this thought that shaped the overall lyrical arc of this album.

"Despite the bleak concept, musically it’s rich and perhaps our most upbeat work for many years. There is also a love song to Leonard Cohen and a song about a big diamond."

In related Marillion news, it was recently announced that Mark Kelly's Marathon would support Big Big Train on their upcoming 2022 tour dates.

Artists

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.