Released on 12 April 2004, Marbles is Marillion’s thirteenth studio album — originally released as a double album — and is widely considered by the band’s fanbase as the definitive statement of the Hogarth era. Produced by Dave Meegan, it was again funded in advance by supporters and released through Racket Records.

The album is an immense achievement: seventy-six minutes of music that operates as a loosely themed meditation on love, loss, identity, and reconciliation. It moves confidently between intimate, small-scale writing and sweeping emotional grandeur, managing throughout to feel coherent and purposeful rather than sprawling.

The centrepiece is “Neverland” — a ten-minute closing track of such emotional accumulation that it has become one of the most beloved songs in the band’s entire catalogue, regularly voted the fans’ favourite Marillion composition. Steve Rothery’s guitar work throughout the piece — and throughout the album as a whole — is extraordinary: patient, melodically inventive, and deeply felt.

Other highlights include “You’re Gone”, which gave the band an unexpected UK top-ten single two decades into their career, and “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, “The Damage”, and “Ocean Cloud” — the last of these an eighteen-minute epic that opens the double album and demonstrates every element of what makes Marillion exceptional as a band.

Marbles was reissued in a comprehensive deluxe edition in 2022, and its reputation as a masterwork of contemporary progressive rock remains entirely secure.