Peter Gabriel stares death in the face: here's the new track "Face The Wall"

Staring death in the face, without exorcising it or hiding from it. Peter Gabriel tackles one of the most difficult and universal themes on “Face The Wall”, the new single previewing “o/i”, his next album expected by the end of the year. It's the ninth song unveiled by the English musician following the full-moon ritual already used for “i/o” in 2023: for now only the dark-side mix, put together by Tchad Blake, is available, while the bright-side version will arrive with the next full moon.

“Face The Wall” grew out of reflections on aging, illness and, above all, the way Western society deals with the end of life. “The lyric is partly about growing old and dealing with illness; it's about staring death in the face, something I don't think we do often enough,” explains Gabriel. According to the English musician, cultures that manage to treat death as a natural part of existence also seem better able to accept it and, precisely because of that, to live more fully.
Despite the subject matter, though, the song leaves a glimmer of hope. Gabriel pinpoints the turning point in the closing section, when he sings “I see you coming through”: as the song grows increasingly intense and the situations described in the lyric become harder, those words open up the possibility of redemption. “Music is a cathartic process for many of us,” Gabriel notes, confident that “Face The Wall” will speak directly to at least part of his audience. The recording features Tom Cawley on piano, Tony Levin on bass and the New Blood Orchestra, with arrangements by John Metcalfe.

The artwork also visually develops the song's theme. The image reproduces "The Nest", an installation by Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata photographed by Mika Huisman at the Amos Rex in Helsinki. The work shows an apparently chaotic mass of chairs invading and spilling over a large wall: a representation in which Gabriel immediately recognized a metaphor for the song. "For me, the wall is there: big, solid, a bit like death," he says. Yet the chairs, everyday objects partly salvaged from local disposal sites, seem to pour beyond that obstacle and climb over it. It was precisely this contrast that struck Gabriel: on one side the seemingly insurmountable presence of the wall, on the other something human and messy that still manages to get past it. "It's a curious image, but it also conveys hope, defying all logic."
Gabriel explained that he was not previously familiar with Kawamata's work and that "The Nest" prompted him to look further into it, finding in it his own attraction to things that break the rules and elude conventional contexts.

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