How 'The Endless River' turned Division Bell leftovers into a Rick Wright tribute

When Pink Floyd began assembling material for a new album in 2013, they weren’t starting from scratch. They pulled over 20 hours of ambient jams and unreleased music recorded during the 1993 The Division Bell sessions — stuff that never made the final cut. David Gilmour and Nick Mason brought in producer Phil Manzanera, who had co-produced The Division Bell, to sift through the archives. The result was The Endless River, a mostly instrumental album built from those fragments, but reshaped and replayed in 2014.

The album became a direct tribute to Rick Wright, who had died in 2008. Wright’s keyboard parts — swirling, patient, atmospheric — dominate nearly every track, and the sole song with vocals, “Louder Than Words,” is a subtle meditation on band relationships. The centerpiece, “Autumn ’68,” actually lifts a Hammond organ solo Wright recorded in 1969 during a session for Ummagumma. That track was originally intended for a solo project; Gilmour found the multitrack, cleaned it up, and slotted it in. It’s the only Pink Floyd song to feature Wright’s voice singing alone.

Gilmour has called the album “a way of celebrating Rick’s enormous contribution.” The cover art, a man rowing down a cloud river toward an infinite horizon, is literally a farewell — a final journey. The Endless River doesn’t aim to be a grand Floyd statement. It’s more like a whispered thank-you, built from the sounds of a keyboardist who always kept his head down and his hands on the keys.