The Drift

Walker wrote The Drift over the decade after Tilt. Cue was the first song completed and is the longest. An early version of Psoriatic had been premiered at Meltdown in June 2000 under the title Thimble Rigging. Its subjects include torture, disease, 9/11, Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon, Mussolini and Clara Petacci, and Srebrenica. Peter Walsh mixed the album, and the orchestra was recorded in a single day at AIR Studios, Hampstead. Psoriatic carries a credit to Bob Carleton for the words Ja-da Ja-da Jing Jing Jing. The album was mastered at Abbey Road.

It reached number 51 in the UK. Treble's Terrance Terich called it a poetic nightmare set to gothic opera, while The Skinny's Duncan Forgan wrote it off as highbrow aural torture. The documentary 30 Century Man shows the sessions, including the percussion made by punching a pork carcass for Clara.

Pitchfork's Dominique Leone, writing on 9 May 2006, said the album was written and produced over seven years and that Walker described his method as working with blocks of sound rather than written arrangements.