Peter Gabriel by Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel's fourth album arrived in 1982 wearing the same name as the three before it, so Geffen gave the American and Canadian pressings a title of their own, Security, and Gabriel went one further and cut a German-language edition, Deutsches Album. Whatever you call it, this is where Gabriel let the rhythm take over. Produced by Gabriel with David Lord and made at Ashcombe House, it pushes further into the post-punk textures and world music he'd been exploring on the 1980 record, stacking up drums and textures into something that feels less like a rock album than a ritual.

"The Rhythm of the Heat" gathers slowly into a thundering menace, "San Jacinto" drifts and then swells, and "I Have the Touch" twitches with nervous energy. But it's "Shock the Monkey", all jittery synths and a chorus that lands like a slap, that finally cracked the American top 40 for him.

Even the cover is unsettling: instead of calling in Hipgnosis, as he had for his first three solo albums, Gabriel handed the job to sculptor Malcolm Poynter, who turned his face into a smeared, warped ghost using video, bendy mirrors, Fresnel lenses and tricks of the light. It suits a record that sounds like one man staring hard at his own reflection and daring it to blink first. The album got a remaster in 2002 with the rest of his catalog.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.