Released on 23 September 2016, F E A R (an acronym for Fuck Everyone and Run) is Marillion’s eighteenth studio album. Produced by Mike Hunter and released through Racket Records, the album reached number 4 on the UK Albums Chart — the band’s highest chart position in nearly thirty years and confirmation that their audience remained both loyal and substantial.

The album is Marillion’s most politically explicit recording — a response to the age of austerity, Brexit, political populism, and a media landscape built on the systematic amplification of anxiety. Hogarth’s lyrics are angrier and more direct than anything since Clutching at Straws, and the emotional temperature throughout is correspondingly high.

The centrepiece is “The New Kings” — an eighteen-minute closing suite that builds from a spoken-word opening through successive movements of accumulating power to one of the most emotionally devastating finales the band has committed to record. It is, by almost any measure, a major work: musically sophisticated, lyrically precise, and structurally fearless.

Elsewhere, “El Dorado” opens the album with dark grandeur, “Living in F E A R” functions as a kind of statement of intent, and “The Leavers” is a gentler, more elegiac counterweight to the album’s more confrontational material.

F E A R stands as proof that a band four decades into their career can still make work that is not just good but necessary — a record that addresses its cultural moment with intelligence, craft, and genuine emotional force.