Depeche Mode’s new album Memento Mori is death-obsessed even by Depeche standards

SANTA BARBARA, California – Martin Gore, who is now 50 per cent of Depeche Mode, works in a studio on a low hill near Santa Barbara, hidden behind jungle-green foliage and fragrant flowering shrubs.

He sat at a console in the centre of the spacious control room, orderly and full of California winter sunshine – a well-lit place to make songs about power, desire, faith and a world spinning ever further off its axis.

Gore, 61, wore black clothes and spotless black boots. He looked like an Englishman who had spent decades in California – vibrant tan, straight white teeth. He had the haircut you would get if you asked a knowledgeable barber to give you “the Martin Gore” – high and tight, with several inches of unruly tuft up top.

In late March, Depeche Mode released its 15th album by a pandemic-era skeleton crew – Gore; vocalist Dave Gahan; producer James Ford; and an engineer/co-producer, Marta Salogni.

As always, the sound is foreboding and sleek, sardonic yet soulful – music for lovers in black-leather-upholstered, bullet-train compartments racing towards ominous destinations.

The title is Memento Mori and the dominant theme is mortality – which is not, in itself, a departure.

Memento Mori, though, is death-obsessed, even by Depeche standards, with lyrics full of ghosts, angels and funeral flowers. Gore said his own mortality had been on his mind, along with Covid-19, which was still cutting a swathe through the world’s population as he wrote in 2020.

But Gore knows that the album and its title are destined to be read through a different lens.

In May 2022, Andy Fletcher, known as Fletch, died at the age of 60 of an aortic dissection. Fletcher was a founding member of Depeche Mode. He and Gore had been friends since grade school.

Nominally a keyboardist, Fletch played a role that was nebulous yet spiritually indispensable – somewhere between manager, quality control supervisor and designated superfan.

“Without Andy, there would be no Depeche Mode,” said long-time radio broadcaster and Depeche fan Richard Blade. “He was not the one composing the music, but he was the one pulling them together.”

Gore saw Fletcher in person for the last time in 2019. He died just weeks before the band were scheduled to begin recording Memento Mori, the first collection of Depeche Mode songs he will never hear.

Gore and Gahan, 60, questioned whether they could or should continue without him. But Depeche Mode had survived potentially band-extinguishing events before – beginning with the departure of Vince Clarke, a founding member who left the group in 1981 after the release of its debut album, Speak & Spell, on which he had been the principal songwriter.

In the 1990s, the band weathered the rise of grunge as well as the departure of keyboardist Alan Wilder and Gahan’s struggle with heroin addiction.

Derided early on by the British rock press, Depeche Mode made converts in the United States. Its breakthrough in the United States came with the platinum album Some Great Reward in 1984 and the single People Are People, an uncharacteristically strident anti-prejudice lament that became a pop-radio hit as well as a gay club anthem.

The gay community was only one of many disparate subcultures from which Depeche Mode built a fan base. On the West Coast, Blade said, the band made converts among “the white kids who would go surfing”, but also connected with Latino listeners who heard a reflection of their own experience in Depeche Mode’s misfit anthems.

“They might have been third-generation Americans, but a lot of people looked at them and said, ‘No, you’re not one of us,’” Blade said.

Gore agreed that the band had become common ground for those who felt like they didn’t belong: “I think humanity is made up of a lot of outsiders and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to do so well.”

By 1988, the group was big enough to pack the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The triple-platinum album Violator, released two years later, yielded hit singles such as Personal Jesus and Enjoy The Silence, which pulsed like techno but brought the guitars to the front of the mix for the first time.

That album was the band’s commercial peak in the US. Minus a 2005 singles collection, no new Depeche Mode album has been certified gold in the country in 22 years.

In a video interview from New York, where he has lived since the late 1990s, Gahan appeared on-screen against what appeared to be a red velvet wall. It resembled the lining of a coffin, which prompted a question about the rumour that Gahan slept in one during Depeche Mode’s reportedly bacchanalian Devotional Tour in 1993.

In 2019, Gahan and his band Soulsavers recorded Imposter, a collection of 12 high-drama covers of songs made famous by artistes including Nat King Cole and Cat Power, performed by Gahan in a manner evocative of both Tom Jones and Nick Cave. Shelved during the pandemic, the album finally dropped in November 2021. The following month, when Gahan played the songs at a few shows in Europe, it felt like the end of something. He spent that Christmas wondering if he would continue making music at all.

During the pandemic, he said he had enjoyed being at home, surrounded by family and friends, finally spending time at a vacation house in Montauk, on Long Island, that he had barely used.

“I can walk along the beach in winter. You don’t see another soul,” he said. “I’m out there playing my guitar along to Stones records. I’m like, ‘I like my life right now. Why would I want to disrupt all this to jump into a Depeche Mode record, which will take me out of that for the next three years?’”

The recording sessions for the previous Depeche Mode album, Spirit, had been contentious. Ever since Clarke’s exit, there had been a clear division of labour in the band. Gore wrote virtually all the lyrics, and Gahan sang Gore’s words. But in the early 2000s, Gahan started making solo albums and began bringing his own songs into Depeche Mode sessions as well.

“Martin wasn’t really keen on some of Dave’s songs and Dave was pushing really hard for them to be on the record. It was very, very difficult,” said Spirit producer Ford.

Ford was told by Depeche’s management that the project was in jeopardy. His solution was to banish everyone except Gahan and Gore from the studio – including Fletcher, their traditional buffer.

“Fletch did not like this,” Gahan said. “In the end, our manager Jonathan had to literally, physically get him out.”

Ford said the following day resembled a marriage counselling session. Gahan recalled that the confrontation was hard. “After all those years, he said some stuff. I said some stuff.”

They cleared the air enough to finish Spirit, released in 2017. Gahan said any reservations he had about making the next album disappeared the moment he heard Gore’s demo for the song Ghosts Again.

“I was like, ‘I can’t wait to sing this song.’”

Then, it was May and suddenly Fletcher was dead.

“I felt, immediately, very supportive of Martin,” Gahan said. “Like, ‘I’ve got to take care of him. This is really much harder on Martin than it is on me.’”

They decided to go ahead with Memento Mori and, according to both Gore and Gahan, Fletcher’s death fostered an intimacy they had never experienced in 40 years as bandmates.

“Every decision that has to be made has to be made by the two of us now,” Gore said. “So, we have to talk things out when we disagree. I don’t think I’ve ever had a FaceTime with Dave before. Now, we FaceTime.”

Salogni, an Italian producer and engineer who has worked with Bjork, Frank Ocean and the xx, said it was wonderful to witness Gore and Gahan’s flourishing friendship and the creativity it engendered.

“With Andy being a filter, after he died, the filter unfortunately disappeared and, suddenly, the curtain dropped and they were there to face each other,” she said. “Honesty comes to the forefront and you just face what you perhaps haven’t faced before.”

The mood at the sessions, Ford said, was sombre. But there was also a lot of reminiscing – Fletcher stories told over long lunches.

“It was honestly a really lovely, beautiful experience,” he said. NYTIMES

Depeche Mode’s Memento Mori is out on major streaming platforms.