Roger Waters' 'Is This the Life We Really Want?' — His First Solo Album in 25 Years and Its Sharp Political Turn

After a quarter-century without a solo record, Roger Waters returned in 2017 with Is This the Life We Really Want? — and he didn’t ease back in. The album is a direct, angry response to post-9/11 geopolitics, bank bailouts, drone warfare, refugee crises, and the rise of Trump. It feels less like a Pink Floyd album and more like a continuation of Amused to Death (1992) or maybe The Final Cut era, but with 2017’s rage turned up. Instead of abstract metaphors about walls and madmen, Waters names names: “The government spent billions / On bombs and on guns,” he sings in “Déjà Vu.”

Politically, it parts ways with most Pink Floyd work. Animals and The Wall critiqued systems through allegory — pigs, dogs, bricks in the wall. Here, Waters drops all pretense. “The Most Beautiful Girl” is a Putin / Trump coded track about narcissistic strongmen; “Smell the Roses” directly references the Iraq War and the “War on Terror.” The album’s cover, a photograph of a Klan rally, sets the tone. It’s not subtle, and Waters doesn’t want it to be.

The recording process was notably different from his Pink Floyd days. Waters worked with producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck) instead of Bob Ezrin or James Guthrie. Godrich pushed Waters to strip things back — no extended instrumental jams, no sprawling soundscapes. The songs are shorter, tighter, built around Waters’ solo voice and acoustic guitar, then layered with atmospheric electronics and field recordings. Waters recorded most of the vocals at his home in New York, then finished in London and Los Angeles. The result is cleaner and more modern than Floyd’s analog-era work, but still unmistakably Waters.