Spring 1995. Peter Gabriel walks into his Real World studio complex in Box, Wiltshire, and starts sketching what he believes will be a quick follow-up to Us. The sessions begin with a working title already in place — I/O — but Gabriel scraps it almost immediately. He wants something shorter, more direct. Up. The word feels right from the very first day. What he doesn't know yet is that this record will consume the next seven years of his creative life, outlasting two British prime ministers and an entire presidential administration across the Atlantic.
The album that almost never came
By 1998, Gabriel tells interviewers the album is nearly finished. The songs exist, the arrangements are taking shape, and a release feels imminent. Then nothing happens. Another year passes, then another. The album becomes a running joke among fans who trade bootlegs of half-finished tracks and speculate about what's going on inside the studio. When Up finally appears on September 23, 2002, it arrives as Peter Gabriel's seventh studio album — and the gap since his last proper record has stretched to a decade.
The music that emerges from those seven years refuses easy categorization. Pop structures collide with ambient textures, world music rhythms, and the kind of progressive rock ambition Gabriel had been refining since his Genesis days. Virgin Records handles the release alongside Gabriel's own Real World imprint, and the commercial response is immediate. In the United States, the album lands at number 9 on the Billboard 200, selling 76,000 copies in its opening week. That debut makes it the highest entry for any British artist on the American chart that week.
Chart positions and critical reception
Across the Atlantic, the reception is more measured. The album reaches number 11 in the United Kingdom, while Italian listeners push it all the way to the top of their national chart. Most critics respond warmly to what they hear — the density of the production, the emotional weight of the songwriting, the sense that Gabriel has spent those seven years building something deliberately strange rather than chasing radio play. The reviews acknowledge the wait without letting it define the music.
Gabriel promotes the record with a world tour called Growing Up in 2003, his first proper tour in ten years. His daughter Melanie joins the backing vocal section, adding a family dimension to the stage production. The concerts are filmed and later released as Growing Up Live, preserving the elaborate theatrical staging that had become Gabriel's trademark. Before the album even hit stores, he had been experimenting with how to present the material — posting videos about each song on his website and releasing demo versions timed to full moons.
Remixes, film soundtracks and TV spots
The album's reach extends far beyond the tour. Trent Reznor contributes a remix, as does the British band Elbow, and both versions surface on the B-sides of singles. The song "I Grieve" had already been living in the world for four years by the time Up appeared, having soundtracked the 1998 film City of Angels. It later turns up in episodes of Smallville and NCIS: Los Angeles. An instrumental version of "Signal to Noise" finds its way into Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
The cover art is deceptively simple: five water droplets arranged diagonally across the frame. Inside each droplet, a distorted reflection of Gabriel's face stares back at the viewer. It's an image that captures the album's central tension — clarity and distortion, intimacy and distance, the sense of a man looking at himself through a medium that bends the light. The design became one of the most recognizable sleeves in Gabriel's catalog, instantly identifiable even at thumbnail size.
Up turns out to be the last album of new Peter Gabriel material for a very long time. In 2010, he releases Scratch My Back, a collection of orchestral covers. A year later comes New Blood, reworking his own songs with an orchestra. But original compositions remain absent. The title I/O, abandoned back in 1995, resurfaces only in 2023 when Gabriel finally delivers his next proper studio album — twenty-one years after Up, and three years before this anniversary.
Twenty-four years after its release, Up still raises a question Gabriel has never fully answered: what exactly happened between 1995 and 2002? The album documents the result, but the process remains opaque. Seven years of work produced ten songs. Somewhere inside that ratio — between the ambition and the silence, the full moons and the unfinished demos — sits a story about perfectionism that Gabriel has never told in full. Maybe the water droplets on the cover aren't reflecting his face at all. Maybe they're reflecting the time it took to get there.