Genesis is the album where the band, now a trio, planted a foot firmly in each of their worlds — the brooding, machine-driven ‘Mama’ on one side, the gleaming pop of ‘That’s All’ on the other, and an eleven-minute ghost story in between. Released in 1983, it topped the UK chart and gave them their first American Top 10 single.

The short version

Genesis (1983) is the twelfth studio album by Genesis, and the only self-titled one. Made by Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford at their own studio, The Farm, and co-produced with Hugh Padgham, every song was written collectively through jamming — hence the name. It reached number 1 in Britain and went multi-platinum on both sides of the Atlantic, driven by the dark, hypnotic ‘Mama’ and the effortless ‘That’s All.’

A band, not a solo album

By 1983 Phil Collins was an enormous solo star, and the press assumed the next Genesis album would amount to a Collins record with the keyboards turned up. The band answered with ‘Mama,’ which sounded like nothing else on the radio. Working at their own Surrey studio — the first album written, recorded and mixed entirely there — the three brought in only fragments of ideas and built the songs together by improvising, then piecing back together the parts they liked. Unable to agree on a title for music so thoroughly collaborative, they simply used the band’s name; the sleeve took its shapes from a children’s toy.

The sound

This is Genesis poised on a knife-edge between their two lives. Drum machines and gated drums dominate the textures, Tony Banks’s synthesizers supply atmosphere rather than fireworks, and Mike Rutherford keeps the guitar sparing. Phil Collins, meanwhile, sings with a new authority — darker, more aggressive, more committed than ever before. Half the album chases the mainstream with real skill; the other half is stranger and moodier than anything on the charts in 1983. It is not a progressive rock record, but the ambition and the shadows have not gone away.

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The songs

‘Mama’ opens the album with a stark drum-machine pulse, bleak synthesizer washes and Collins’s chilling laugh — borrowed, he admitted, from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five — before erupting into a dark, obsessive climax. It became their biggest UK hit. ‘That’s All’ is its opposite: a warm, Beatles-flavoured pop song on which Collins deliberately played, in his own words, a Ringo Starr drum part. The album’s heart is the two-part ‘Home by the Sea’ and ‘Second Home by the Sea,’ Banks’s eerie tale of a burglar trapped by ghosts who force him to hear their stories forever — eleven minutes of genuine grandeur, and the last real bridge to their 1970s selves.

Reception and legacy

Genesis went to number 1 in the UK and stayed on the chart for a year, selling in enormous quantities in America too, where ‘That’s All’ became their first Top 10 single and MTV made them stars. Critics welcomed a band who had reinvented themselves with confidence, and it drew Grammy nominations. One track has not aged at all well: ‘Illegal Alien,’ on which Collins adopts a stereotyped Mexican accent, was compounded by a crass video, and is now widely regarded as an embarrassing misjudgement. Otherwise the album is remembered as the last on which the prog and pop Genesis coexisted, before Invisible Touch tipped the balance for good.

The verdict

Genesis is not the album to convert a prog purist, and newcomers should still begin with Foxtrot or A Trick of the Tail. But it rewards an open mind more than its reputation allows. Approached as an art-pop record with a dark undertow, it is superbly crafted and often thrilling, and its best songs stand with anything the trio made. Come for the menace of ‘Mama’ and the charm of ‘That’s All,’ and stay for ‘Home by the Sea’ — the moment Genesis looked back at their old selves one last time.

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