It took nearly eight years to get here. The idea had been around even longer, but touring, bands, studios and the general business of being professional musicians kept getting in the way. Four of the seven pieces grew out of a two-day session at Marillion’s Racket Club studio in 2019. From there the music travelled between home studios and London, being pulled apart and rebuilt. The result sounds less like a corporate supergroup project than two old friends finding a room where they could make some noise.
And the sea is everywhere.
That makes sense for Rothery. He grew up in Whitby, where the North Sea could be a beautiful thing one minute and a bastard the next. He has described hearing the waves roaring during winter storms and remembering Whitby as a powerful, poetic place to grow up. Those memories are all over this album.
Hackett brings something older and stranger. He has spent a lifetime moving between rock, classical music, blues, folk, world music and atmospheric sound. With Genesis he helped create some of progressive rock’s most distinctive guitar moments, from the acoustic delicacy of “Horizons” to the great electric eruption of “Firth of Fifth.” After Genesis he went further out, making solo records that treated the guitar as both instrument and landscape.
Rothery came through another door.
As Marillion’s guitarist, he became one of the great sustain-and-space players of British progressive rock. His sound was never about showing how many notes could be crammed into a minute. It was about finding the note that mattered and letting it hang there until you felt it. His solo work, particularly The Ghosts of Pripyat, carried that same cinematic instinct into instrumental music.
So there is history here.
Hackett was one of the guitar voices of classic Genesis. Rothery was one of the defining guitar voices of Marillion. And Rothery has long counted Hackett among his influences.
Now they have made a record together.
The album begins with “The Storm,” and there is no messing around. The sea is already there. The atmosphere gathers. Guitars circle one another while keyboards and percussion gradually make the weather worse. Then Hackett and Rothery begin talking.
Not arguing. Just talking.
One guitar makes a statement. The other answers. The piece grows without rushing, and when the guitars finally lock together the effect is enormous. It is prog rock stripped of the furniture. No vocal telling you what the storm means. You are left to decide.
By the end, the weather breaks. Next up “Sandsend” is quieter and perhaps more beautiful. The title refers to the Yorkshire coastal location near Whitby, and it feels personal without becoming sentimental. The guitars have room to breathe. Rothery’s ability to make a sustained note sound like a human voice sits beautifully beside Hackett’s more intricate, classical phrasing.
Then comes “Red Dragon,” and the ship comes out of the fog and this is the sound of two legends enjoying each other company. There is a heavy riff, unusual textures, sitar guitar and hurdy-gurdy. Hackett has said the title refers to the Red Dragon, a ship associated with the East India Company, while Rothery described the piece as showing the rockier side of their collaboration.
It sounds like two guitarists opening an old trunk and finding instruments they had forgotten they owned.
The title track “The Roaring Waves” is the centre of the record. It begins with Hackett on classical guitar. The notes are delicate. Almost too delicate. Then the machinery starts behind him. Keyboards gather. Electric guitar appears. Rothery enters with that long, singing tone of his. The piece swells slowly, patiently, until the two guitars seem to become one large instrument.
This is where the record earns its title as it doesn’t merely describe the sea. It behaves like it. There is a pull and release to the arrangement. The music advances, retreats, gathers itself and comes back harder. The playing is superb, but the important thing is that neither man tries to dominate.
“K-129” is the dark water. The track takes its title from the Soviet submarine that sank in the Pacific in 1968. Electronic textures pulse underneath the guitars. There is a sense of machinery far below the surface. It is probably the strangest track here.
“The Black Sea” is where the collaboration makes its strongest argument. It was released as the album’s first single, and it is easy to understand why. The melody is strong. The atmosphere is dark without becoming miserable. Rothery’s warm, sustained guitar sits against Hackett’s more detailed colouring and the contrast is exactly right.
“Pacific Coast Highway” is the odd one out, and that is why it works. There is rhythm. There is movement. Hackett brings out the harmonica, an instrument he first played as a child, and the guitars become looser and more bluesy. There are wordless vocals, organ and a feeling of sunlight coming through the windscreen.
The remarkable thing about The Roaring Waves is not that Hackett and Rothery can play. Any fool knows that. The remarkable thing is how little they need to prove it.
Put them together and the obvious temptation would have been to make a guitar record. They made something else. They made pictures.
A film without actors. A coastline without tourists. A road with nobody telling you where it ends.
Ultimately The Roaring Waves is what happens when two men with nothing left to prove sit down and listen to each other. There is no contest here. No twelve-minute duel in a car park. No desperate race toward the highest note. The guitars come and go like weather. Sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they rise up and hit you in the chest.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
