On Nov. 22, 1974, the British band Genesis unveiled their sixth studio album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, an audacious double record that represented the pinnacle of 1970s progressive rock. A concept work that chronicles the journey of a Puerto Rican kid named Rael in New York City’s Manhattan, The Land Lies Down on Broadway – which featured the classic Genesis lineup of Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford — remains arguably the band’s career-defining work to this day, the title song, “In the Cage” and “The Carpet Crawlers” went on to become part of the group’s setlists on their subsequent tours.
Fifty years later, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – the final Genesis album to feature lead singer Gabriel — is seeing the light of day again as a super deluxe edition set to be released on March 28, 2025, Rhino announced Wednesday (Ahead of the announcement, the band’s social media posts teased both the anniversary and reissue).
Available in 5-LP/Blu-ray, 4-CD/Blu-ray and digital formats, the set’s highlights include, according to Rhino’s news release: the original album mix remastered; a Blue-ray audio disc featuring remastered 96kHz/24-bit high-resolution audio and Dolby ATMOS mixes of the album; three previously unreleased demos from the Headley Grange sessions available via a digital download card; the full The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Live at the Shrine Auditorium show from January 24, 1975 (the concert was previously released from the Genesis Archive 1967-1975 box from 1998); and a 60-page book containing photos and interviews with Banks, Collins, Gabriel, Hackett and Rutherford — all of whom were involved in the new reissue.
The new set includes liner notes from The Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis, who wrote, per the news release: “Talking to the former members of Genesis about The Lamb…nearly half a century on, it’s hard not to be struck by the fact that they seldom agree about it. Some members of the band have said they think it’s the best album of their career. Others think of it as a brave but flawed experiment…In fact, there’s every chance that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is all those things—flawed experiment, career highlight, prog masterpiece, weirdly prescient precursor of punk—at once, which might account for its longevity.”
In his 2016 memoir Not Dead Yet, Collins offered his assessment of The Lamb: “It’s one of the few Genesis albums I can put on and be surprised by, not that I can ever remember having listened to it in its entirety. But it’s a high-water mark for the band in some respects, and even the Spinal Tap reference is a compliment, backhanded or otherwise.”
The announcement of the upcoming Lamb super deluxe edition follows the re-release of the band’s 14 studio albums (from 1970’s Trespass to 1997’s Calling All Stations) on 180-gram vinyl that began this past summer.
