Peter Gabriel Returns With i/o, His Long-Awaited New Album

Peter Gabriel has announced a new album, o\i, the follow-up to his 2023 release i/o. The project continues his recent pattern of pairing music with long-term conceptual and visual experimentation, blending technology, art, and philosophy into a slow-unfolding release.

The album’s first single, “Been Undone,” is out now.

A Lunar Release Schedule Returns

As with i/o, Gabriel is once again embracing an unconventional rollout. Throughout 2026, he will release one new song from o\i during each full moon. By the end of the year, the full album will be revealed.

Each track will be issued in two versions: a “Dark-Side” mix and a “Bright-Side” mix. While the Dark-Side mixes will arrive with the full-moon releases, the Bright-Side versions will follow during each month’s new moon, creating a steady, rhythmic cadence that mirrors the album’s thematic interest in cycles, reflection, and duality.

Art, Structure, and “Been Undone”

Every song on o\i will be paired with a unique visual artwork. The piece accompanying “Been Undone” is Ciclotrama 156 (Palindrome) by São Paulo–based artist Janaina Mello Landini. According to a press release, the work is “a mirrored composition structured around a central knot, allowing the piece to be read forward and backward as a visual and structural palindrome.”

Gabriel has long been drawn to Landini’s rope-based sculptures, and he elaborated on their impact in a statement.

“The way she takes the rope and moves it out, unravelling it, is almost like fractals or tree trunks and looks like the brain in some ways too, so I see a lot of entry points,” he said.

The imagery aligns closely with Gabriel’s recurring fascination with systems—biological, emotional, and technological—and how meaning emerges through repetition and transformation.

AI, the Future, and Finding Connection

Lyrically and conceptually, o\i explores what Gabriel describes as a period of unprecedented global transition. He points to emerging technologies as catalysts for profound change.

“I have been thinking about the future and how we might respond to it,” Gabriel said. “We are sliding into a period of transition like no other, most likely triggered in three waves: AI, quantum computing and the brain computer interface. Artists have a role to look into the mists and, when they catch sight of something, to hold up a mirror.”

He also described the relationship between i/o and o\i as complementary opposites.

“These are my lumpy bits – i/o: the inside has a new way out and o\i: the outside has a new way in.”

For Gabriel, these ideas extend beyond technology and into how people understand themselves and their place in the world.

“We are not, and have never been, the exclusively self-determining, independent beings that have been given the run of the world. We are something else, a part of nature, a part of everything and feeling a connection, shaking our booty and giving and receiving some love can help us find our place — and put a big smile on our faces.”

Some of the material on o\i will feed into a long-running brain-focused project Gabriel has been developing for years, while other songs exist for simpler reasons.

“Some of these songs are going to form part of the brain project that I’ve been exploring for a number of years, and some just make me feel happy. I hope you like them.”

That balance—between intellectual curiosity and emotional release—has become a defining feature of Gabriel’s later work. Rather than offering clear answers, o\i appears to invite listeners into a space of questioning, reflection, and shared experience. In an era increasingly shaped by machines and rapid change, Gabriel’s approach suggests that music still has the power to slow things down, encourage connection, and remind audiences of the human element at the center of it all.