Peter Gabriel shares the song Looking for the Happy from his album o/i

Peter Gabriel has released "Looking for the Happy," the newest single from o/i, his album due later this year through Real World. The exact release date has still not been announced, which is consistent with a rollout that has been running on lunar cycles rather than a schedule anyone can plan around.

The pattern comes from his last record. As with 2023's i/o, every song on the album gets a Bright-Side and a Dark-Side mix, and each single arrives on the night of a full moon. This is the Bright-Side mix, and it runs about eight and a half minutes, which counts as brisk next to the ten-minute "One by One" that preceded it a month earlier.

Gabriel set out to write against his own instincts. "I've always found it so much easier to write sad songs than happy ones," he said, describing a decision to build the track on a groove that made dancing irresistible and a chorus that felt like a celebration. He talks about the song as being about noticing what makes you happy now, communicating with animals, sitting under an old oak tree with a cup of tea, and, in his words, doing a little less complaining as he gets older.

The music started as a groove with a Latin flavour, which he says is how a lot of his songs find their shape: if he cannot feel it in his body, the rest of the work gets harder. The album was recorded at Real World Studios in Bath and The Beehive in London, with Tchad Blake mixing the Dark-Side versions and Mark Stent the Bright-Side ones.

Each single gets its own cover artist. This one uses "Closed Circuit II," a 1986 work by Tishan Hsu, which Gabriel compares to Miro and Paul Klee for its apparent simplicity while noting it is built from traditional painting and sculptural technique despite being about technology. He was struck that a piece often likened to the original Instagram logo predates it by decades.

The singles have piled up: "Been Undone," "Put the Bucket Down," "What Lies Ahead," "Till Your Mind is Shining," "A Hard Lesson," "I Belong to the Sky," "Won't Stand Down" and "One by One" all preceded this one. That follows i/o, which was his first album of original songs in more than twenty years, after 2002's Up.

The single is filed under rock and pop, and the album will join the schedule on the release calendar once Real World names a date. Veteran rock songwriters have had a busy season in our coverage, from Roger Taylor sharing I See You Now to Radiohead's Ed O'Brien releasing the solo album Blue Morpho.