We’ve known about Pink Floyd’s The Endless River — the band’s first record since 1994’s The Division Bell — since summertime. The 18-song double-album is assembled from the Division Bell sessions and will land on Nov. 10.
What’s new, though, is the concrete-sounding word of guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour saying this is the official end of the line for Pink Floyd. “Well, Rick [Wright] is gone. This is the last thing that’ll be out from us,” Gilmour told the BBC (via the Guardian). “I’m pretty certain there will not be any follow up to this. And Polly, my wife, thought that [final song “Louder Than Words”] would be a very good lyrical idea to go out on. A way of describing the symbiosis that we have. Or had.”
The album, according to The Guardian, “has been described as a tribute to [Richard Wright], a man whose talents were under appreciated by the public, media and the band themselves, according to Gilmour.” Wright was Pink Floyd’s keyboardist; he cofounded the band in 1965 and departed in 1979, though he later returned for two more albums. He died in 2008 at the age of 65. “I didn’t necessarily always give him his proper due,” Gilmour says of Wright. “People have very different attitudes to the way they work and we can become very judgmental and think someone is not quite pulling his weight enough, without realizing that theirs is a different weight to pull.”
The Endless River will feature a Stephen Hawking cameo on “Talkin’ Hawkin'” and no shortage of dissent from original member Roger Waters, who parted with the band in 1985.