Fear of a Blank Planet

Wilson began writing in Tel Aviv in early 2006 while he was recording the second Blackfield album, and Barbieri wrote most of the music for My Ashes there. Band sessions in London in July and August produced a good number of songs, from which six were picked. The album came out on 16 April 2007 from Roadrunner in Europe, then from Atlantic in the United States on 24 April, WHD in Japan on 25 April and WEA in Canada on 1 May. The title nods to Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, and the concept comes from Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park: the album is mostly told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old called Robby, and many of its lyrics are lifted from the novel, My Ashes especially.

Every track flows into the next as a single piece of about fifty minutes, conceived like a 1970s two-sided record. Cheating the Polygraph was played on the autumn 2006 preview tour but dropped as not developed enough, and Way Out of Here, the only full-band composition on the record, was written to replace it. Robert Fripp supplied soundscapes on Way Out of Here, and Alex Lifeson, who had said in Classic Rock that he was a fan, recorded his Anesthetize solo in his own studio and sent it to Wilson.

Listening parties were held at Legacy Studios in New York and Abbey Road Studios in London in January 2007. The album debuted at 59 on the Billboard 200, entered the European Top 100 at 21, and sold about 250,000 copies worldwide. A special edition limited to 10,000 copies sold out within a day. Metacritic gave it 82 from nine reviews, AllMusic gave it 4.5 out of 5, and Rolling Stone's David Fricke heard a merger of Rush's arena art rock, British prog and the post-grunge vengeance of Tool. It was Classic Rock's album of the year, the top album of 2007 on Metal Storm, and a Grammy nominee for best surround sound album. The 2007 tour played 92 dates, and the band reached Finland and Mexico for the first time.