Released on 24 September 2012, Sounds That Can’t Be Made is Marillion’s seventeenth studio album. Produced by Mike Hunter and released through Racket Records following a fan pre-order campaign, it arrived to considerable acclaim and is widely regarded as one of the strongest albums of the band’s later career.

The album is notable for its political ambition. “Gaza” — an eleven-minute centrepiece inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — is one of the most politically direct compositions Marillion has made, and its unflinching engagement with the human cost of the conflict divided opinion while demonstrating that the band had lost none of their willingness to tackle difficult subjects head-on.

Elsewhere, “Power” opens the album with a statement of considerable sonic force — arguably one of the hardest-edged recordings the band has made in the Hogarth era — while “Lucky Man” and “The Sky Above the Rain” offer a softer, more meditative counterbalance. Steve Rothery’s guitar playing throughout is in exceptional form, and the album contains some of the most textured and emotionally varied playing of his career.

Sounds That Can’t Be Made announced, emphatically, that Marillion remained not just a functioning creative unit but a band still capable of producing genuinely important, engaged, and musically sophisticated work well into the third decade of the Hogarth era.