How 'The Endless River' Became a Posthumous Tribute to Richard Wright from 'Division Bell' Leftovers

After Richard Wright’s death in 2008, David Gilmour and Nick Mason sat on a mountain of unused material from the 1993 The Division Bell sessions—over 20 hours of ambient jams recorded in the houseboat studio on the River Thames. Gilmour initially didn’t know what to do with it. At first, the plan was just a purely instrumental ambient album, a kind of sonic wallpaper. But listening back, he kept hearing Wright’s keyboard parts, his last studio recordings before his cancer diagnosis, and decided the album had to center on those.

The decision process was simple: honor Rick. Gilmour and Mason, along with producer Phil Manzanera, sifted through the tapes and built The Endless River around Wright’s keyboards, adding new guitar and drum parts but never overshadowing his contributions. The album became a eulogy, a way to let Wright’s final musical breaths ring out one more time. The only new vocal is a brief snippet of Wright himself singing in the track “Louder Than Words.” Everything else is atmosphere, texture, and the ghost of a band member who quietly held them together.