Everything Is Recorded & Peter Gabriel & IDK – Beyond The Brilliant Haze
Everything Is Recorded, Richard Russell’s revolving-door studio project, has built its reputation on pairing artists who’d otherwise never end up in the same room. “Beyond the Brilliant Haze” might be the clearest example yet: Peter Gabriel and Maryland rapper IDK on the same track, out now on XL Recordings. We’ve covered the project before with Losing You (W47), and this one moves in a different direction entirely, away from the folk and soul textures of 2025’s Temporary and toward something rougher around the edges.
The song’s origins go back to the sessions for Gabriel’s i/o, where Russell co-produced “Four Kinds of Horses.” Ideas left over from that period got reworked into the bones of this track, with Gabriel rewriting the melodic section himself once Russell sent the material back over. IDK came in afterward, and his verses sit against Gabriel’s voice without either one smoothing the other out. Mike Elizondo mixed it at Gabriel’s request, the same producer behind 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.”
All three artists describe the collaboration as a genuine surprise to put together. Gabriel called bringing IDK in “an inspired choice” that gave the track its sharpest contrasts. IDK, for his part, said the result “feels like a beautiful mess of juxtaposition”, which is about as accurate a one-line review as you’ll get from someone who made the thing. Russell’s instinct for unlikely pairings isn’t new, his work with Gil Scott-Heron, Bobby Womack, and Damon Albarn all points the same direction, but this is one of the starker contrasts he’s pulled off.
It’s a strange track by design, three very different voices refusing to cancel each other out.
