Depeche Mode keeps it fresh, fully fleshed out with “Black Celebration”

In their heyday, Depeche Mode kept making album after album of fleshed out, moody worlds that felt both lush and murky. Leading up to their peak, though, Depeche Mode had one highlight of their early career that kickstarted a more atmospheric and lush sound. That album is “Black Celebration.”

As they were developing their sound in their early career, Depeche Mode started heavily using industrial-sounding drums and brooding melodies. You can hear these ideas shine through in some songs more than others, like how their 1984 song “People Are People” sounds like a more pop-sounding Electro-Industrial song or how several songs are based off of their 1982 album “A Broken Frame.” This development in their overall sound starts to hit its stride in their 1986 album “Black Celebration.”

“Black Celebration” is an album that features all of Depeche Mode’s greatest features: lush and gothic-sounding melodies, punchy, pointed drums and introspective, vulnerable lyrics.

The lush sound of melodies within “Black Celebration” is a departure from many of their early-career work, which featured more minimal melodies. Songs like the title track and “World Full of Nothing” set up dystopian worlds with skyscrapers and dark, cloudy skies around a city.

Depeche Mode did keep some aspects of melodies in earlier work, though, which was how they implemented a gothic atmosphere in their sound. Previously, their more gothic-sounding songs were more inspired by early The Cure, using a thin-sounding foreground with a lower, deep-sounding background (Think “Leave in Silence). On “Black Celebration,” Depeche Mode uses that more lush sound to create a prominently dramatic and gloomy foreground to complement their foggy background.

One thing Depeche Mode knows how to do is have the perfect set of drums for most situations. The lush, dramatic melodies played in the backgrounds of songs throughout the album seem like they’re easily cut through by Depeche Mode’s piercing drumbeats. An early example of this on the album is “Fly on the Windscreen (Final).”

The drums feel like the song has extreme stability, similar to a concrete foundation for a building, which feels like an extremely apt comparison given that Depeche Mode literally used industrial-sound samples here like drills. The drums on “Fly on the Windscreen (Final)” perfectly set the scene for the foreground melody and, frankly, the rest of the album.

“Stripped” has drums like “Fly on the Windscreen (Final),” but “Stripped” has drums that work a lot more with the story of the song. I’ve always interpreted “Stripped” as a song about breaking free from the past and forging a new life as your authentic self. The drums throughout the song reflect this by being piercing and loud, sounding like hitting something and trying to get it to break. The drums on this song also add a nice groove that becomes infectious after a few listens. First, it subtly seeps into your brain, and then, you can’t stop listening to it.

While “Stripped” describes breaking free and being yourself, the rest of the record lyrically is more on the pessimistic side. Songwriter Martin Gore does an excellent job of writing dystopian lyrics. On deeper cuts like “Sometimes,” Gore uses lyrics like “When you look around, You can’t tell me honestly, You’re happy with what you see,” to express a feeling of dread in where you find yourself while never straying away from that dystopian mood of the overall album.

Depeche Mode’s early career tends to have many shifts in sound and spotty moments throughout it. “Black Celebration” is the moment where these shifts and sounds tried to, in their earlier days, become a more unified, better-sounding whole. Every time I listen to “Black Celebration,” I understand a little bit more of how this set the stage for much more known and fleshed out albums during the peak of their career.