Genesis and Marillion Guitarists Team Up for New Collaboration

Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery are set to unveil a collaborative album that’s been some eight years in the making. The former Genesis guitarist and Marillion co-founder will release The Roaring Waves on Aug. 28.

“When you’re friends first, and the music comes later, you know it’s non-competitive and something else starts to happen,” Hackett told Prog magazine.

The Roaring Waves features seven instrumental tracks, all inspired by the British seaside town where Rothery lived as a youngster. “In winter you could hear the roaring of the of the waves during the stormy weather,” Rothery said in an official statement. “Whitby was a very evocative place to live, a very poetic and powerful place to grow up.”

Inside Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery’s New Album

Hackett was with Genesis from 1971-76, a span that began with the U.K. Top 40 hit Nursery Cryme and ended with the gold-selling Wind and Wuthering. More recently, Hackett has been presenting whole-album retrospective shows devoted to the era. The most recent was 2025’s The Lamb Stands Up Live at the Royal Albert Hall. His last original LP dates to 2024’s The Circus and the Nightwhale, also a Top 40 U.K. hit.

Work on The Roaring Waves began in earnest in 2023, with sessions held at Buckinghamshire’s Racket Club in between their own individual projects. “It was a bit old school our approach, like the idea of mates getting together in the garage and playing and hanging out,” Hackett said in the news release.

Steve Hackett rose to initial fame with Genesis in the early ’70s. (Dennis Stone / Express, Getty Images)

Rothery is Marillion’s co-founding guitarist and the longest serving member, but he’s been far less prolific than Hackett as a solo artist. Rothery’s lone album is 2014’s The Ghosts of Pripyat. Rothery’s other side projects have included Bioscope and the Wishing Tree.

“If you’d have told the 15-year-old me, who was just discovering Genesis and starting to learn to play guitar, that one day this legendary guitarist would be a great friend of mine 40-odd years later, I’d have fallen over,” Rothery told Prog.

Pre-ordering for The Roaring Waves is set to begin on June 26. Marillion’s latest studio project was 2022’s An Hour Before It’s Dark.

Listen to Steve Hackett on the ‘UCR Podcast’