Depeche mode memento mori leaked on reddit, The Exquisite Darkness
Martin Gore, who now owns 50 percent of Depeche Mode, works from his studio on a low hill near Santa Barbara, hidden behind jungle-green foliage and fragrant flowering shrubs.
On a Tuesday morning in January, he sits at a console in the middle of a control room that’s spacious and uncluttered, bathed in the California winter sun—a clean, well-lit place to create about power, desire, faith, the world Always turn further around its axis.
Gore wore a black outfit and immaculate black boots. He looked like a Brit who had lived in California for decades—brilliant tan, perfect teeth. If you ask a knowledgeable barber to give you a “Martin Gore,” his cut is what you’ll get: high and tight, with irregular tufts of a few inches at the top.
Two summers ago, when Gore turned 60, that “really hit me in the face,” he says with a morbid laugh. “I don’t feel particularly 60, but you have to accept that. It feels like you have at least one toe in the grave.”Depeche Mode will release its 15th album, much of which was recorded at this studio, with a skeletal pandemic-era crew: Al Gore, singer Dave Gaghan, producer James Ford ( Florence + the Machine, Arctic Monkeys) and an engineer/co-producer, Marta Saloni. As always, the sound is ominous, elegant, sarcastic yet soulful – music lovers rushing toward ominous destinations in high-speed train carriages with black leather cushions.
The title is “Memento Mori,” and the theme is death—not a departure in itself. “Death is everywhere,” Gore wrote years ago in a song called “Flies on the Windshield,” whose narrator goes on to wave, “Come on, kiss me now,” because you’ll never have no idea.
Even by Depeche’s standards, however, “Memento Mori” is an obsession with death, with lyrics filled with ghosts, angels and mourning flowers. Writing in 2020, Gore has been thinking about his own mortality rate, and how Covid-19 is still spreading among the world’s population.
But Gore knew the album and its title meant to be read through a different lens. In May 2022, Andy Fletcher, known as Fletch, died suddenly of an aortic dissection at the age of 60. Fletcher was a founding member of Depeche Mode; he and Gore had been friends since elementary school.
