Released on 14 September 1998, Radiation is Marillion’s tenth studio album and their first release through their own independent label, Racket Records, having broken from EMI the previous year. Produced by Dave Meegan, the album marked a significant departure in tone — harder, more abrasive, and more experimental than most of the band’s previous work.

The album was recorded quickly and with relatively little studio polish, and that rawness is intentional. Tracks like “Costa del Slough” and “A Few Words for the Dead” have an urgency and directness that differs from the more carefully constructed atmospheres of Brave or Afraid of Sunlight. The production reflects a band finally free of commercial expectation and choosing to use that freedom to push into less comfortable sonic territory.

Running through the record is a preoccupation with environmental anxiety and modern disillusionment — Hogarth’s lyrics engaging with a world that feels increasingly irradiated by noise, consumption, and disconnection. It is thematically consistent without being a formal concept album in the traditional sense.

Radiation is not typically cited among the band’s most accessible records, but it represents an important moment of creative reinvention — a band choosing authenticity over accessibility and demonstrating that independence, even when uncomfortable, was preferable to the constraints of a major label relationship.