Peter Gabriel: listen to "One By One", the new single inspired by kintsugi that previews the album "i/o"

Peter Gabriel has released “One By One”, another piece falling into place ahead of “o\i”, the album expected to arrive by the end of the year. As with previous singles “Been Undone”, “Put the Bucket Down”, “What Lies Ahead”, “Till Your Mind Is Shining”, “A Hard Lesson” and “I Belong To The Sky”, this one too arrives to coincide with the full moon and is available in the Bright-Side Mix version crafted by Mark “Spike” Stent. Following the tradition begun with “i/o”, the Dark-Side Mix will instead be released at the next new moon.
Written and produced by Gabriel himself, “One By One” is part of the theatrical and narrative project the British artist is developing alongside the new album, and marks the return of Mozo, a character introduced many years ago and now the protagonist of a story of rebirth and reconstruction.

“This is another song that comes from the ‘Brain Show’ series I've been working on, in which the character has been literally torn apart and is trying to put himself back together piece by piece,” Gabriel explained. “I needed a character for the story, and I'd always wanted to explore the character of Mozo a bit more, whom I'd introduced many years ago, and I thought: well, let's give him another chance. He's been brought back to life. What interested me about Mozo was the fact that he wasn't fully part of the world, nor fully outside it. In the original narrative of the second album, he was found on a rubbish tip, and there was a reference to alchemy, to how you can really create gold only from the humblest material: shit. In Japanese culture there's also kintsugi (kin: gold, tsugi: repair), in which a broken cup is repaired with gold or precious metals, and the repaired cup, even with its visible flaws, ends up being more valuable than the original. It's a beautiful symbol of humanity, because we're incredibly fragile, and the attempt to put ourselves back together, to rediscover our own psyche and sanity, is really the journey told in the song.”

The central theme of the song is precisely that of transformation through one's own wounds. Gabriel uses the Japanese practice of kintsugi as a metaphor for the human capacity to rebuild after a fracture, making scars an integral part of one's identity rather than trying to hide them. “One By One” is also one of the most narrative tracks on “o\i”, conceived as a story that takes time and attention to fully absorb.
The visual imagery follows this same idea of fragmentation and reassembly. The single's cover art uses “Pieces”, a work by Canadian sculptor David Altmejd, whom Gabriel came to know through the 2022 “9x9x9” project and who was later involved in creating a piece inspired by the song's music. “One of the things I love about David's work is the way it seems to capture images and ideas, and then cut them up and reassemble them,” Gabriel explained. “Almost like moments of time, or like an old flip book where each image shows a slight movement compared to the previous one. It felt perfectly connected to this song.” Altmejd himself pointed out that “One By One” evokes “a kind of spiritual evolution through the reassembling of one's broken parts,” a process the artist also recognizes in his own creative method, made up of building, destroying and then rebirthing his sculptures.

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