O\I

O\I (stylised as o\i) is the upcoming eleventh studio album^a by English musician Peter Gabriel, expected to be released by the end of 2026.¹ Like its predecessor I/O (2023), each song on the album will receive both "Bright-Side" and "Dark-Side" mixes and will be released to correlate with each month's full moon and new moon, respectively.⁴ The "Bright-Side" mixes were created by Mark "Spike" Stent, while the "Dark-Side" mixes were handled by Tchad Blake.⁵ The album will be available in its entirety once all tracks have been released individually throughout the year.¹

In addition to new material recorded during 2024 and 2025,⁶ O\I collects previously unreleased tracks or outtakes from the sessions of Gabriel's previous three albums Us (1992), Up (2002) and I/O.⁷ The oldest song on O\I is "A Hard Lesson", which dates back to the sessions of Us between 1989 and 1992,³⁷ while some other tracks from the album were initially conceived as early as 1995 when Gabriel began working on Up and portions of I/O. O\I was completed by December 2025, about a month before the release of its lead single "Been Undone".⁶⁷

In an interview published in March 2023 with Uncut magazine, Gabriel mentioned that he had a surplus of material from his I/O album, which at the time was still being rolled out with song releases coinciding with the full moon. He expressed interest in continuing this practice beyond the final release date of I/O using his existing batch of 20 songs. Gabriel cited two of his songs that were used on film soundtracks as possible contenders for a follow-up album to I/O, specifically "The Veil" from Snowden and "Why Don't You Show Yourself" from Words with Gods.⁸

In November 2023, Gabriel said that his song "What Lies Ahead" would also appear on the follow-up to I/O.⁹ Gabriel had performed "What Lies Ahead" on a few occasions for his I/O The Tour in 2023.¹⁰ One day prior to I/O's release, Gabriel told The New York Times that he did not expect a follow-up album (which he described as his "brain project") to take another 21 years, saying that "there's a lot of stuff in the can" but added that the material was not yet finished.¹¹

Gabriel announced the album title O\I in a February 2025 article published in Mojo.¹² On 3 January 2026, "Been Undone" was released as the album's first single, corresponding with the wolf moon.⁵ He mentioned that some songs on the album would be part of a brain project, which he had been "exploring for a number of years."⁵ One of those songs was the album's second single, "Put the Bucket Down", which was released on 1 February 2026.² Gabriel plans to release more songs from the album on days that correlate to the full moon.¹

Like I/O, the each track on the album has received a Bright-Side and Dark-Side mix created by Mark "Spike" Stent and Tchad Blake, respectively.¹³ Discussing the nature of the different mixes, Gabriel commented that "people always think that the emotion all comes from the song, but actually you can change that enormously by the way you move things, dip them and bring them out, and isolate certain sounds and instruments – by the way you tell the story. It"s very much a creative contribution with these wonderful mixers."¹⁴