Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Some collaborations happen overnight. This one took the best part of a decade and change.
Steve Rothery and Steve Hackett first floated the idea of making a record together roughly 11 years ago. Recording itself stretched across eight of those years, squeezed between Marillion tours, Genesis anniversary shows and whatever else two of prog rock's most recognizable guitarists had cluttering their calendars. The result, The Roaring Waves, finally arrived as seven instrumental tracks built around a single, sprawling subject: the sea.
"It's not the kind of album that guitarists normally make together," Hackett said of the record. "I suspect that most guitarists tend to make albums where people try to outplay each other and show their chops to an enormous degree. I'll be very interested to see what the reaction is from fans. If you're expecting something typically proggy, I don't think this is it. It's more cinematic, almost ambient at times."
Rothery and Hackett were already friends, in the habit of getting together to talk shop long before any tape rolled. Early sessions happened whenever both men's schedules lined up, which, given their day jobs, was not often. Everything shifted once Hackett's keyboardist, Riccardo Romano, started sitting in. Romano ended up doing double duty, later engineering and mixing the finished record.
"It meant that we started to sound like a band, you know, three people in a room making a noise," Hackett told Rodrigo Altaf of Sonic Perspectives. "That works very well. If it's just two people, you're relying on technology completely. But it meant that we were having a three-way conversation rather than a two-way conversation. And I think that that was key to bringing everything in, really."
Neither guitarist came in with a stack of finished songs. That was intentional. Hackett contrasted the free-form sessions with his old Genesis days, when he would typically arrive with material already mapped out. That philosophy extended to keeping their egos out of the way. Two guitarists this decorated could easily have turned the record into a technical pissing contest. Neither wanted that.
"We know those guys can play very, very fast, and that's part of the stock in trade," Hackett said, pointing to shredders in general rather than any name in particular. "But then there's also this other area that was baffling to me when I first heard Fleetwood Mac doing this track called 'Albatross' all those years ago. Hardly a shred fest. If you play sometimes very gently, and just add a few notes, it can be very effective. I think the beauty of the guitar is, it's something my mother says to me, funnily enough: don't forget about that one note, that one note that you can do that is the killer."
He name-checked Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton as players who mastered the art of the sustained note, singling out Clapton's solo on "I'm Your Witch Doctor" with John Mayall as an early example of restraint doing more than speed ever could.
If Hackett brought the restraint, Rothery brought the setting. He grew up in Whitby, on England's northeast coast, and the sea has clearly never left him: "In winter you could hear the roaring of the waves during the stormy weather," he said. "Whitby was a very evocative place to live, a very poetic and powerful place to grow up. So I suppose this record is a way of expressing some of those memories and emotions about what the sea meant to me."
He expanded on just how central that duality is to the record, describing the sea as something that refuses to stay one thing for long.
"The sea has many moods," Rothery said. "It can be tranquil and beautiful, with the sun setting over the horizon. It can be an angry, vicious monster who just wants to pull you back, pull you down to the bottom of the sea. Growing up by the sea, seeing the bravery of the lifeboat crews who launched these inflatable dinghies into terrible weather conditions to try and save someone's life, the sheer scale of that human spirit against the sea, it's quite humbling."
For Rothery, The Roaring Waves fits neatly alongside a run of instrumental, soundtrack-minded work, including Bioscope, his collaboration with Thorsten Quaeschning, and his 2014 solo album Ghosts of Pripyat: "Once there's this thing that happens, once you name a track, once you give it an identity, it almost whispers in your ear what it needs to complete itself," he told Altaf. "I think that's very true of this kind of music in particular. Once it's defined, it wants to be born."
As for a follow-up to The Roaring Waves itself, don't hold your breath. Both guitarists say vague ideas exist, and both would love to eventually play the record live, but with schedules this packed, 2028 is the earliest realistic window for either.
Given it took 11 years just to get here, that might actually count as fast.
Some collaborations happen overnight. This one took the best part of a decade and change.
Steve Rothery and Steve Hackett first floated the idea of making a record together roughly 11 years ago. Recording itself stretched across eight of those years, squeezed between Marillion tours, Genesis anniversary shows and whatever else two of prog rock's most recognizable guitarists had cluttering their calendars. The result, The Roaring Waves, finally arrived as seven instrumental tracks built around a single, sprawling subject: the sea.
"It's not the kind of album that guitarists normally make together," Hackett said of the record. "I suspect that most guitarists tend to make albums where people try to outplay each other and show their chops to an enormous degree. I'll be very interested to see what the reaction is from fans. If you're expecting something typically proggy, I don't think this is it. It's more cinematic, almost ambient at times."
Rothery and Hackett were already friends, in the habit of getting together to talk shop long before any tape rolled. Early sessions happened whenever both men's schedules lined up, which, given their day jobs, was not often. Everything shifted once Hackett's keyboardist, Riccardo Romano, started sitting in. Romano ended up doing double duty, later engineering and mixing the finished record.
"It meant that we started to sound like a band, you know, three people in a room making a noise," Hackett told Rodrigo Altaf of Sonic Perspectives. "That works very well. If it's just two people, you're relying on technology completely. But it meant that we were having a three-way conversation rather than a two-way conversation. And I think that that was key to bringing everything in, really."
Neither guitarist came in with a stack of finished songs. That was intentional. Hackett contrasted the free-form sessions with his old Genesis days, when he would typically arrive with material already mapped out. That philosophy extended to keeping their egos out of the way. Two guitarists this decorated could easily have turned the record into a technical pissing contest. Neither wanted that.
"We know those guys can play very, very fast, and that's part of the stock in trade," Hackett said, pointing to shredders in general rather than any name in particular. "But then there's also this other area that was baffling to me when I first heard Fleetwood Mac doing this track called 'Albatross' all those years ago. Hardly a shred fest. If you play sometimes very gently, and just add a few notes, it can be very effective. I think the beauty of the guitar is, it's something my mother says to me, funnily enough: don't forget about that one note, that one note that you can do that is the killer."
He name-checked Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton as players who mastered the art of the sustained note, singling out Clapton's solo on "I'm Your Witch Doctor" with John Mayall as an early example of restraint doing more than speed ever could.
If Hackett brought the restraint, Rothery brought the setting. He grew up in Whitby, on England's northeast coast, and the sea has clearly never left him: "In winter you could hear the roaring of the waves during the stormy weather," he said. "Whitby was a very evocative place to live, a very poetic and powerful place to grow up. So I suppose this record is a way of expressing some of those memories and emotions about what the sea meant to me."
He expanded on just how central that duality is to the record, describing the sea as something that refuses to stay one thing for long.
"The sea has many moods," Rothery said. "It can be tranquil and beautiful, with the sun setting over the horizon. It can be an angry, vicious monster who just wants to pull you back, pull you down to the bottom of the sea. Growing up by the sea, seeing the bravery of the lifeboat crews who launched these inflatable dinghies into terrible weather conditions to try and save someone's life, the sheer scale of that human spirit against the sea, it's quite humbling."
For Rothery, The Roaring Waves fits neatly alongside a run of instrumental, soundtrack-minded work, including Bioscope, his collaboration with Thorsten Quaeschning, and his 2014 solo album Ghosts of Pripyat: "Once there's this thing that happens, once you name a track, once you give it an identity, it almost whispers in your ear what it needs to complete itself," he told Altaf. "I think that's very true of this kind of music in particular. Once it's defined, it wants to be born."
As for a follow-up to The Roaring Waves itself, don't hold your breath. Both guitarists say vague ideas exist, and both would love to eventually play the record live, but with schedules this packed, 2028 is the earliest realistic window for either.
Given it took 11 years just to get here, that might actually count as fast.
