Released on 4 March 2022, An Hour Before It’s Dark is Marillion’s twentieth studio album. Produced by Mike Hunter and released through Racket Records following a fan pre-order campaign, it reached number 2 on the UK Albums Chart — the highest chart position of the Hogarth era and the band’s best chart performance since Clutching at Straws in 1987.

The album was written and largely completed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but found its themes — mortality, the fragility of what we have built, the urgency of appreciating the present — given new resonance by the global experience of 2020 and 2021. Hogarth has spoken about the album as a meditation on the awareness of late-life: the deepening understanding that time is finite and that what matters most becomes correspondingly clear.

“Be Hard on Yourself” is one of the most powerful opening sequences in the band’s catalogue — a three-part suite that moves from urgent, almost uncomfortable self-examination through grief to something approaching resolution. The title track is a slow-burning, immensely moving piece, and “Sierra Leone” engages with themes of conflict and resource exploitation with unflinching clarity.

Steve Rothery’s guitar work throughout the album is a constant source of wonder — melodically precise, emotionally generous, and played with the kind of authoritative yet self-effacing mastery that comes from a lifetime of devoted musicianship. Pete Trewavas and Ian Mosley are equally compelling, and the band’s collective performance has a cohesion and depth that only comes from four decades of playing together.

An Hour Before It’s Dark is Marillion’s statement for the present moment — and evidence that this most enduring of British progressive rock bands remains creatively vital, emotionally honest, and entirely themselves.