During the pandemic I've been following Steven Wilson's youtube channel because he's been posting vids of himself alone in his home studio doing a bunch of different stuff from his career, some PT and some solo stuff. It's really good stuff and I recommend you check it out. It was making me really long for a proper return of the full PT lineup. And here we are. I wonder if his COVID imposed exile and revisiting some of these old tracks got him thinking it was time to get the band back together. Seems the band has been on his mind lately.
Oh heck yeah, was watching every single one of those when they came out. Even inspired me to try to figure out the weird timing of the piano chords during the introduction to "Collapse the Light into Earth". Have you been listening to his
The Album Years podcast with his partner in crime from No-Man, Tim Bowness? It's great fun, they talk about a bunch of albums from years picked at random throughout rock history. The reason I bring it up is that he discusses his own motivations in music-making occasionally, so there's some talk about the sorts of things he has planned (very) occasionally.
He completely didn't talk about the Porcupine Tree reunion, so I think he fully intended to surprise everyone with it. Either that or it was very sudden. He
did mention in an interview when
Future Bites came out that he had exhausted the guitar-oriented sound of Porcupine Tree, which is why
Future Bites was so synthesizer oriented. But he's allowed to change his mind. That said, he doesn't seem to be interested in creating sequels so much as new chapters, so I still hold out hope that this will be new and interesting. That's what I crave in general. I will still always love the Pink Floyd fetish era the most, but I don't tend to only listen to my favourite music, so I hope I love this as much as anything else he's done.
I don't think he's doing this one just for himself, I really honestly think he's doing this because he wants to work with Barbieri again. And Gavin. He was definitely steering this one into more of an ensemble effort as they grew, so I see no reason he wouldn't encourage that all the more this time as well
WRT the bassist -- yes, I think they wanted a completely different style for this iteration. Colin had more of a Precision Bass, classic tone, and whoever's playing on the new track has a much more modern, spankier Jazz Bass end-of-the-spectrum tone. That said, Colin is also stuck in Australia, so perhaps couldn't.