No-Man fan site All The Blue Changes has an interview with Steven Wilson. About the Together We’re Stranger album, which is widely considered to be the best No-Man release:
I have that sense for every record I’ve ever made. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have carried on working on it. It would be a very depressing thought to think you were halfway through something and then start to think to yourself, “You know what? This is really isn’t that special.” I don’t think Together We’re Stranger felt any more special than Returning Jesus or Wild Opera. It’s only in retrospect that albums reveal their true immortality or not.
I would have thought, if anything the “songwriting” was probably more rigorous on Returning Jesus because the first half of Together We’re Stranger is almost like a tone poem. There’s very little in the way of conventional songwriting. I guess it’s one of those times when an album turns out to have a magic about it that you couldn’t really have contrived. It just has a magic. And that’s something that kind of revealed itself over a period of time to both us and the listeners.