Marillion

British prog-rock veterans deliver a pandemic-era classic.

Marillion’s last album, 2016’s FEAR (Fuck Everyone And Run), was the perfect state-of-thenation address. A dark, existential dissection of modern ‘Britishness’, released in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, it held a mirror up to society and didn’t particularly like what it saw.

This follow-up is equally timely. Work on An Hour Before It’s Dark began in early 2020 just as Covid-19 started to take hold, and continued as uncertainty, anxiety and death rates began to soar in the world outside the studio walls. It was inevitable that global events were going to impact the music Marillion were making. And so it proved.

Yet while An Hour Before It’s Dark has every right to be an exercise in sad-face navel-gazing, the result is anything but. The spectre of the pandemic inevitably hovers over its six tracks, but emotions that flow through the album aren’t so much fear or anger as compassion and hope.

Opening track and first single is a dramatic nine-minute exhortation to.