“i/o” is Peter Gabriel’s first album in 12 years, and his first album of all original material in 21. Gabriel must have known expectations would be high for his comeback, as he’s spent the whole year promoting the album’s release, putting out a new song the night of each full moon. So dedicated was he to ensuring the album’s quality, that when faced with two separate masters of the album, he simply decided to release both at the same time (for the purposes of this review, we will be focusing on the “Dark-Side Mix”, done by Tchad Blake). All of Peter Gabriel’s efforts seem to have paid off in this case, with “i/o” being a solid comeback record that both highlights and develops Peter Gabriel’s strengths as a musician.
The opening track, “Panopticom”, draws us into the album’s world with punchy drums and a dark, funky industrials sounds. Gabriel claims to have written the song about “an infinitely expandable accessible data globe.”, although his optimistic view of such a thing in interviews comes off as being at odds with the track’s paranoid lyrics (“And we reach across the globe/Got all the information flowing/You face the motherload/Tentacles around you”). The following track, “The Court”, develops the industrial influences even further, but is ultimately let down by weak vocals. There are parts in the song where Gabriel’s voice was so overprocessed that it started to sound like I was listening to Imagine Dragons.
The album begins to slow down with “Playing for Time”, a lush though slightly bland piano ballad about feeling trapped by the passage of time. The title track, “i/o”, is a more anthemic piano-driven song with a booming, sing-along chorus that elevates the potentially dull lyrics about living in harmony with nature (“So we think we really live apart/Because we got two legs, a brain and a heart/We all belong to everything/To the octopus' suckers and the buzzard’s wing”).
Named for an ancient Buddhist parable, “Four Kinds of Horses” is one of the best songs on the album, a dark examination of religious violence that effectively blends both the industrial influences of the first two tracks with the melodic influences of the second two. The presence of a string section works far better here than it did on “Playing for Time”, as it wonderfully combines with Gabriel’s vocals to create a sense of climactic urgency.
“Road to Joy” features a return to the worldbeat sound of Peter Gabriel’s earlier works and is by far the most danceable song on the album. The song is propelled forward by a deep, bass-driven groove that, funnily enough, reminded me in some places of the macarena. “So Much” is a rather basic piano number written about the fear of aging (“The body stiffens, tires and aches/In its wrinkled, blotchy skin/With each decade, more camouflage/For the wild-eyed child within”). While the song is fantastically produced, I could not help but get the feeling that it was missing something, although I can’t say for sure what.
“Olive Tree” is the most reminiscent song of Peter Gabriel’s previous hits, although featuring a fuller, lusher production. This especially shines through during the song’s chorus, wherein bright, sunny trumpets cut through the instrumentation like an audial embodiment of happiness. Ominously enough, Peter Gabriel has claimed that the song is part of “part of a separate brain-related project” that he’s working on, refusing to give any further details.
Another highlight of the album is “Love Can Heal”, an atmospheric, synth-driven ballad that sounds like you’re being enveloped in a warm embrace, and features some of Gabriel’s best vocal work on the album. This is followed up by “This is Home”, a charming, off-kilter ode to domesticity that allegedly developed from a brainstorming session that Gabriel had with Skrillex.
“And Still” was written as a tribute to Gabriel’s late mother, and, at just under 8 minutes in length, is the longest song on the album. Fortunately, while perhaps a little overlong, “And Still” is one of the best songs on the album from a lyrical perspective (“And in every corner, memories form/You warmed us like the sun/And every morning you'd be there/Now you're gone”), and a touching tribute to a dead loved one. Unfortunately, the album’s last track, “Live and Let Live”, is one of the weaker ones on the album, with lyrics and melodies that seem like they were written for a charity supergroup single (When we forgive we can move on/Release all the shackles one by one/We belong to the burden until it's gonе). At the very least, the song shines through well enough on the production front for it not to be a complete failure.
“i/o” is, for better or worse, exactly what I would expect a Peter Gabriel album released in 2023 to sound like. While nothing too groundbreaking, it does show Gabriel continuing to experiment and incorporate new influences into his sound. As such, this manages to be one of those rare comeback records that I can see both satisfying old fans of his work as well as possibly attracting new ones.