Ne Plus Ultra: Depeche Mode’s Often Overlooked Electronic-Rock Opus at 25

The late 1990s saw a bevy of rock acts dabbling their toes, if not diving headlong, into the then-burgeoning electronica genre. U2 had famously tread similar waters with 1991’s Achtung Baby and 1993’s Zooropa, and their under-appreciated Pop was initially met with favorable reviews in the spring of 1997. But it was Radiohead’s OK Computer, which dropped just two months later, that emerged as a seminal artifact of the era. Its template of dueling guitars and synths set to nervy, politically charged lyrics would be emulated by bands on both sides of the Atlantic well into the 21st Century.

Lost in the shuffle at the time was Depeche Mode’s Ultra, released in the weeks between Pop and OK Computer. With its urgent but steady pacing, ominous synth stabs, and slithering guitar riffs, the album’s second track, “The Love Thieves,” would fit inconspicuously alongside OK Computer’s “Paranoid Android” and “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” The difference, of course, was that Ultra found Depeche Mode inching back toward synth-pop—a realm they ruled throughout the ’80s—after 1993’s more rock-oriented Songs of Faith and Devotion.

Following the success of 1990’s Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion made an immediate splash around the world. But both the arduous recording process and subsequent tour for that album strained relationships within the band, resulting in longtime member Alan Wilder quitting in 1995. Moreover, lead singer Dave Gahan had developed a nasty heroin habit and struggled to perform when the remaining members regrouped to record what would become Ultra. The vocals on songs like the haunting “Sister of Night,” recorded during early New York sessions while Gahan was strung out, allegedly had to be comped together piecemeal.

By the time Gahan overdosed in a hotel on the Sunset Strip in 1996, resulting in his heart stopping for two minutes before being revived by paramedics, Depeche Mode’s own prospects of resuscitation seemed dim. (A documentary that accompanied a 10th anniversary edition of Ultra was winkingly titled Oh Well, That’s the End of the Band…) Presumably scared straight, Gahan threw himself back into work on the album, though it took over a year to finish.

At the time of Ultra’s release, the rock press’s fascination with both Wilder’s semi-contentious departure from the band and Gahan’s Lazarus-like rise from the dead—not to mention the singer’s preoccupation in interviews with his own resultant mythology—eclipsed a proper assessment of the music itself. More subdued than the grungy, industrial rock-driven Songs of Faith and Devotion, Ultra found the newly christened trio rediscovering the synth-driven sound that propelled Depeche Mode to fame, complemented by lyrics that feel more grounded than the heady offerings of the album’s aptly titled predecessor.

Though not explicitly about Depeche Mode’s frontman, the themes of imprisonment and redemption that then-primary wordsmith Martin Gore explores throughout Ultra dovetail not just with Gahan’s battle with addiction—“A vicious appetite visits me each night/And won’t be satisfied, won’t be denied,” Gahan sings on “Barrel of a Gun”—but with Gore’s own personal struggles. On the symphonic “Home,” Gore delivers one of his strongest vocal performances to date, confronting dependency and death with some of the most poetic lyrics he’s ever written: “The heat and the sickliest sweet smelling sheets/That cling to the backs of my knees and my feet/Well, I’m drowning in time to a desperate beat.”

Gahan and Gore were fans of Gavin Friday’s Shag Tobacco, and enlisted that album’s producer, acid house pioneer Tim Simenon (best known for Bomb the Bass’s late-’80s club hit “Beat Dis”) for Ultra. Rather than eschew live instrumentation, though, the band embraced it; in Wilder’s absence, they invited a series of guest musicians to record live percussion, pedal steel, and other instruments, which Simenon then sampled and looped like a DJ. On “The Bottom Line,” Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s motorik grooves butt up against Living Colour bassist Douglas Arthur Wimbish’s wobbly low end, which briefly drops out toward the end of the song, substituted by Gore’s deep, gospel-tinged background vocals.

If Ultra served as a spiritual rebirth for Depeche Mode, it was also a transitional work in the band’s catalog. The album isn’t a huge departure, but rather another step forward in a decade-spanning evolution. The group was simply continuing to do what they’d always done: flawlessly blending rock and electronica—and analog and digital—on tracks like “Useless,” whose overt guitar hook is contrasted by processed horn blasts and vintage modular synths.

There’s no clear standout single like “Enjoy the Silence” or “In Your Room” on Ultra—though “It’s No Good,” which evokes so-called “classic” Depeche Mode, comes close. Instead, the album consistently flows from one track to the next, with instrumental interludes serving as connective tissue, a structural approach that the band would employ on subsequent albums.

Though Ultra and Ok Computer share similar sonic DNA, the former feels revelatory and liberating where the latter is decidedly claustrophobic. “Step out of your cage and onto the stage,” Gore seems to dare Gahan to sing in the wake of his newfound sobriety on the bluesy “Freestate.” The album ends on a fleeting moment of hope, with the minimalist “Insight”—its straightforward message to “give love” a rarity in Depeche Mode’s canon and, in the wake of the band’s near-destruction, a redemptive thematic emblem they would follow faithfully into the 21st century.