i/o, by Peter Gabriel
When a musician puts more than two decades between albums of new material, fans stop anticipating and start worrying. As if reassuring everyone else while expressing his own confidence, Peter Gabriel previewed i/o, his first album of originals since 2002’s Up, by releasing singles on every full moon of 2023 and by playing every song from the album on tour.
Now that its 12 songs can be heard as one collection, i/o indicates, in a maturely unshowy way, that Gabriel’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. His voice retains the qualities—that humane rasp, that surprised falsetto, that susurrating low end—that have kept him interesting and arresting since at least 1974, when he fronted the ambitious Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
Gabriel also retains his knack for wryly dignified pop hooks: “Road to Joy,” with its multilayered keyboards, uber-funky bass line (longtime Gabriel favorite Tony Levin brings it), and open sensuality, is this album’s update of 1986’s “Sledgehammer” or 1993’s “Steam.” It even borrows a tempo and guitar figure from David Bowie, Carlos Alomar and John Lennon’s “Fame.”
If the rest of i/o doesn’t tie so directly to Gabriel’s brief period of chart-topping ubiquity, or to his prog-rock pioneering, it does encompass much of his legacy, whether locking into global rhythms (“The Court”), digging in the dirt of emotional upheaval (“Love Can Heal”), or coaxing rather than jerking tears via piano balladry (“So Much”).
Besides Levin, Gabriel calls upon a dizzying number of helpers, including Brian Eno, his daughter Melanie Gabriel, and the Soweto Gospel Choir. The heavy personnel load does not weigh down the uplift in the title track and “Olive Tree”; nor do multiple album mixes—particularly Tchad Blake’s Dark-Side and Grammy-festooned Mark Stent’s Bright-Side—genetically alter the clarity of the songs.
Instead, the players and the mixes consistently deepen i/o, an album that doesn’t need to be worth the wait. It simply asks, with aged kindness and nearly immaculate craft, to be heard in this long, present moment.
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i/o, by Peter Gabriel
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