The Pineapple Thief “Far and Wide” Album Review by: Antoine Karam

Oct 1, 2026

Twenty-seven years into a career that has produced sixteen studio albums, The Pineapple Thief have done something that should, by every reasonable expectation, have made their new record worse. They took things away. Far and Wide, out October 9th on InsideOutMusic and the band’s first for the label, was built around a set of self-imposed restrictions that most progressive acts would regard as an act of vandalism against their own identity. The surprise is how much the subtraction reveals.

The rule came from Bruce Soord, and he has been unusually blunt about it. No more than two guitar parts at any one time. No six-part harmonies when only three people sing. His reasoning was that the band are five men on a stage and the studio should reflect that rather than contradict it. For a group whose reputation was built on dense, atmospheric layering, this is close to heresy. It is also the single most interesting creative decision any established prog band has made this year, because it treats the live show as the authority and the record as the thing that must justify itself to it, rather than the other way round.

Gavin Harrison describes the same instinct from behind the kit, talking about picturing a section under stage lights and letting that image shape the arrangement. A decade and seven albums since he joined, his presence here is less about the technical fireworks he is famous for and more about pacing. Listen to how the opening of New World Order establishes its intricate pattern and then refuses to escalate, content to let Jon Sykes move underneath it. That restraint is the whole album in miniature.

What follows is paced with real deliberation. Hold The Ashes introduces harder edges without ever becoming blunt, the weight arriving through texture rather than volume. Still Living then opens up considerable space, a slower piece carried by piano and softly delivered vocal, and the thing worth noticing is how much air is left around the instrumentation. On a denser record those gaps would have been filled. Here they are the point.

God Knows is the pivot, and it carries one of the heaviest guitar parts on the album over atmospheric keys from Steve Kitch. Soord has described the lyric as broadly autobiographical, about regret and the ghosts that come out of it, and the song’s position as the fourth track rather than a later climax matters. It functions less as a peak than as a hinge, which is the sort of sequencing decision that only works if the album is genuinely meant to be heard whole.

The middle stretch is where the patience pays. This Empty Space carries a genuine unease beneath its prettier surfaces and a guitar solo that says a great deal without saying much. Scattering Like Flies builds without ever announcing that it has started building, the drums pushing it forward steadily rather than relentlessly. Through The Noise holds back for roughly three and a half minutes before the guitars and drums finally break loose, and the release lands because it has been so thoroughly earned. These are not songs that chase a chorus. They accumulate.

Then Who Wants It sits surprisingly close to straightforward pop before the familiar left turns arrive, and closer No Exceptions, at seven minutes and sixteen seconds the longest thing here, begins as little more than a voice in the dark. Drums gather, guitar drifts in, and around the five-minute mark the playing finally turns urgent and resolute before the song declines the obvious grandstanding finish and retreats back into quiet. Ending an album about restraint by refusing the big ending is either perfect or perverse, and I lean towards perfect.

There is one genuine irony worth sitting with. A record built on removing layers is being released in Dolby Atmos, alongside a 5.1 mix and high-resolution stereo, in a limited artbook that also carries an instrumental disc and the bonus track Daylight. The surround-sound community, which follows Soord‘s mixes closely, is already divided, with at least one longtime listener calling the Atmos mix technically accomplished but artistically unpersuasive while preferring the dedicated 5.1. That tension is fascinating rather than damning. An album that asks what you can hear when fewer things are competing for your attention is arguably the ideal candidate for immersive audio, and arguably its worst possible match. I suspect this is a record people will end up arguing about in formats rather than in songs.

Far and Wide is nine songs in roughly forty-eight minutes, which is brisk by prog standards and the right length for what it is attempting. It is melancholy without becoming oppressive, intricate without disappearing into technique for its own sake, and it rewards being heard from beginning to end in a way that increasingly few records bother to earn. The band have spent recent years playing progressively bigger rooms, and you can hear the confidence that comes from knowing a song will work in one. If the constraint was a gamble, it paid.

My favourites are No Exceptions, which I expected to admire and ended up genuinely moved by, Through The Noise for the discipline of that long build, and Still Living for the sheer nerve of leaving that much space. Two other observations. First, the cover carries an image of an abstract sculpture by the late Michael Schoenholtz, father of Harrison‘s longtime partner Hannah, which gives the artwork a private weight the album never mentions. Second, the band head out on a North American run in November and a genuinely enormous UK and European tour through spring 2027, and given that these arrangements were reverse-engineered from the stage, the live versions may well be the definitive ones.

Pre-order / stream Far and Wide: thepineapplethief.lnk.to/FarAndWide-Album

Rating: 8.5/10

Album Details

Album: Far and Wide
Artist: The Pineapple Thief
Type: Sixteenth studio album
Label: InsideOutMusic
Release Date: October 9th, 2026
Runtime: Approximately 48 minutes

Tracklist

New World Order
Hold The Ashes
Still Living
God Knows
This Empty Space
Scattering Like Flies
Through The Noise
Who Wants It
No Exceptions (7:16)

Plus bonus track Daylight on the limited 2CD and Blu-ray artbook edition.

Band Members

Bruce Soord – lead vocals, guitars
Jon Sykes – bass, backing vocals
Steve Kitch – synthesizers, keyboards
Gavin Harrison – drums

Additional Personnel

Producer, engineer, mixing and mastering credits are not documented in the label materials or in the published reviews consulted.
Cover image: abstract sculpture by the late Michael Schoenholtz.
Videos for New World Order and God Knows directed by George Laycock at Black Tide Productions. The Hold The Ashes video was directed by Jeremy George of Blacktide Productions and filmed at School Farm Studios in the UK.
Band photography credits appear variously as George Laycock and Martin Bostock across different materials.

Formats

Limited 2CD and Blu-ray artbook (bonus track, instrumental disc, Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD 5.1 Surround, 24/48 stereo), Special Edition CD digipak, gatefold LP in several colour variants, digital stereo and Dolby Atmos.