Martin Gore, who now owns 50% of Depeche Mode, works at a studio tucked away behind jungle-green vegetation and fragrant flowering bushes on a low slope close to Santa Barbara.
On a Tuesday in January, he works at a console in the center of a room that is open and uncluttered and bathed in the winter sun of California. It is a tidy, well-lit space where he may think about power, desire, faith, and the world. Always rotate more slowly around its axis.
Gore donned clean black boots and a black suit. His superb tan and white teeth gave him the appearance of a Brit who had lived in California for many years. If you ask a skilled barber to give you a “Martin Gore,” you’ll get a high, tight cut with a few inch-long, erratic tufts on top.
That “really slapped me in the face” two summers ago when Gore reached 60, he adds with a morbid chuckle. Despite the fact that I don’t feel my age, you must accept that. You have the impression of having at least one toe in the grave.
With a skeleton pandemic-era staff of Al Gore, singer Dave Gaghan, producer James Ford (of Florence + the Machine and the Arctic Monkeys), and engineer/co-producer Marta Saloni, Depeche Mode will release their 15th album on Friday. As usual, the sound of music lovers speeding toward sinister places in bullet train cars with black leather seats is gloomy, exquisite, sardonic, and soulful.
Death is the theme of the song “Memento Mori,” which is not unusual in and of itself. Gore once sang, “Death is everywhere,” in the song “Flies on the Windshield,” whose narrator then waves, “Come on, kiss me now,” since you’ll never know.
Even by Depeche’s standards, “Memento Mori” exhibits a death fixation due to its use of ghosts, angels, and funeral flowers in the lyrics. Gore has been reflecting on his own mortality rate while writing in 2020, as well as how Covid-19 is still spreading among the world’s population.
Gore, however, was aware that the album’s title and its content should be interpreted differently. Fletch, also known as Andy Fletcher, passed away at the age of 60 from an aortic dissection in May 2022. Fletcher and Gore were friends since elementary school and were both founding members of Depeche Mode.