YMMV / Melt

• Accidental Innuendo: From "Games Without Frontiers":
  Hans plays with Lottie
  Lottie Plays with Jane
  Jane plays with Willi
  Willi is happy again
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Atlantic Records, Gabriel's U.S. label at the time, declined to release his third self-titled album because they thought it was uncommercial. Not only did they think it would flop, they thought Gabriel had completely lost his mind. Mercury Records released it instead, with the single "Games Without Frontiers" becoming a hit in the U.K. and reaching the Hot 100 stateside. The album also reached number 22 on the Billboard charts and went gold. The Atlantic exec who made the decision to drop Peter Gabriel, John Kalodner, realized his mistake and quickly snapped Gabriel back up for Geffen Records when he moved to the fledgling label, which later reissued the album and held the US distribution rights to Gabriel's 1980-2002 albums all the way until 2010.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Start", a short, jazzy saxophone solo with minimal backing, bridges "No Self Control" and "I Don't Remember".
• Epic Riff: The "gated reverb" drum beat of "Intruder".
• Fan Nickname: While this is officially Peter Gabriel's third self-titled album, fans called it Melt, due to the cover art. Later reissues used this title, making it Ascended Fanon.
• Genius Bonus: The use of a yellow logotype on the otherwise Deliberately Monochrome cover can seem like just another idiosyncratic design choice. However, there may be a greater level of depth to it: while most photographs of the event are in black and white, color pictures of Steve Biko's funeral show that a banner in the same shade of yellow was flown atop his casket during the procession.
• Growing the Beard: Although Gabriel's first two solo albums sold reasonably well, and his debut single "Solsbury Hill" was a breakthrough hit, Melt is generally considered by most people (and by Gabriel himself) as the record where his career as a solo artist truly began to take off, and proof that he could produce substantial work outside of and distinct from Genesis. Gabriel himself believes that this album is where he truly found himself artistically.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Family Snapshot" was inspired by An Assassin's Diary, a memoir by Arthur Bremer that detailed his motives for shooting Alabama governor George Wallace. That book was the direct inspiration for Taxi Driver four years before Melt, and that film would infamously inspire John Hinkley Jr. to shoot Ronald Reagan, thus giving "Family Snapshot" an indirect and inadvertent connection to an attack that Gabriel never anticipated.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The musical-esque style of "Family Snapshot", a song about shooting a government official for attention, seems amusingly prescient in light of Assassins, an entire musical based around that very concept and made ten years later.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The "melting face" cover ◊, and the similar covers for the related singles "No Self Control"◊ and "Games Without Frontiers"◊. The cover image actually was inspired by a nightmare album cover designer Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis had.
  • "Intruder", whose booming drums, cavalcade of dissonant sounds and chants, and invasive lyrics and vocal delivery are designed to set the listener on-edge.
  • The music video for "I Don't Remember". The song, at least on the album (the video uses a heavily edited live version) is nightmarish enough on its own, but the video... Have fun trying to get used to leather couches again.
  • "Lead a Normal Life" is quietly creepy, a sunny melody juxtaposed with Gabriel's howling.
• Paranoia Fuel: "Intruder", "I Don't Remember", and "No Self Control" all invoke this, with the former featuring the burglar narrator directly addressing the listener when referring to his crimes and the latter two being vivid songs about mental collapse.
• Values Resonance: The lyrics of "Biko" gain extra pertinence with increased awareness of ongoing police brutality against black people in the west in the decades since the song's release, with a number of high-profile Police Brutality incidents over the years shining more light on the uncomfortable truth that killings like that of Biko are most certainly not the exception for countless Black people around the world.

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