How The Endless River Resurrected and Completed Unreleased Tracks from The Division Bell Sessions

After Richard Wright’s death in 2008, David Gilmour and Nick Mason returned to the vault of jams recorded during the 1993 Division Bell sessions. What they found was hours of ambient, exploratory material—mostly improvised, instrumental pieces that had never been formally arranged or released. Rather than leaving them as dusty artifacts, they decided to build an album around them, with Wright’s keyboard contributions forming the emotional core.

To complete the tracks, Gilmour and Mason added new guitar, bass, and drums, while also bringing in session players like Guy Pratt on bass and longtime collaborator Phil Manzanera as a co-producer. The result is The Endless River (2014)—a largely instrumental album that feels like a single, drifting suite. Only one track, “Louder than Words,” gets a lyric, written by Polly Samson and sung by Gilmour. The rest are reimagined snapshots from that ’93 era, polished and woven together without overwriting Wright’s original feel. It’s less a “new” Pink Floyd album and more a final, loving document of how the band sounded when they were just playing together in a room.