i/o

This album has been added to 2 public lists:

• 

  2023 Listens

  Barry

  I've been listening to the singles quite a bit over the past six months. I'm excited to have these songs in album form, finally, and it's a very good album IMO!

• 

  Best, Favorite, & Most Interesting Albums Of 2023

  Mark Harrison

  • Genre: Art rock, art pop.

  • Influenced by: Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Robert Johnson, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon.

  • Similar artists: Marillion, Talking Heads, Sting, Steve Winwood, Kate Bush.

  • About this album: Yes, it does actually exist. Finally. The i/o stands for “input/output.” There hasn’t been a lot of output from Gabriel in recent times – this marks his first full-length studio release of new material since 2002's Up. So, yeah. Two decades, plus. The album contains two sets of mixes for the same songs, a “bright side” mix and a “dark side” mix, with the bright (a.m.) side being more upbeat and the dark (p.m.) mix being more subdued. There are contributions from Ai Weiwei, Nick Cave, Olafur Eliasson, Henry Hudson, Annette Messager, Antony Micallef, David Moreno, Cornelia Parker, Megan Rooney, Tim Shaw, David Spriggs and Barthélémy Toguo. Gabriel dropped advances from the album throughout the year on the occasion of each full moon of 2023, but those don't even remotely do justice to the album as a whole. A highly ambitious project that doesn’t disappoint and, just maybe, might have been worth the wait.

  • Metacritic Score: 87 (Universal Acclaim).

  • Grammy Nominations: None, released too late for this year’s consideration.

  • Song To Sample: Four Kinds of Horses (Bright-Side mix); The Court (Dark-Side mix)).