3 Songs That Show How Depeche Mode Redefined Synth-Pop in the 1980s

Depeche Mode was part of the Second British Invasion in the early 1980s, while becoming something like The Beatles of electronic music. With a heavy use of synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines, Depeche Mode broke from rock tradition and instead looked to Kraftwerk as their North Star.

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They may have looked to Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, David Bowie, and others. But Depeche Mode created a signature style that transformed synth-pop while also inspiring some of the biggest names in rock: Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Arcade Fire, The Killers, and others.

For sure, choosing only three Depeche Mode songs feels as punishing as a relentless Martin Gore loop. Still, rather than viewing this as a complete picture, consider it a snapshot of one of the great bands, not in electronic music history, but music history period.

“Never Let Me Down Again” (1987)

If you’re going to redefine synth-pop in the 1980s, may as well do it with … a guitar. The Martin Gore-penned second single from Music For The Masses features a processed guitar riff so good it inspired Billy Corgan to cover it with The Smashing Pumpkins for a Depeche Mode tribute album in 1998. “Promises me I’m as safe as houses / As long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers,” Dave Gahan sings here about the dark consequences of escaping reality.

“Stripped” (1986)

One of Depeche Mode’s eternal bangers that foreshadowed the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails. It begins with a sample of a revving engine from Gahan’s sports car. The rest of the track contains multiple samples, pitch-shifted and manipulated beyond recognition. Depeche Mode made its own instrument out of the sampler and created a new musicality out of the world around them. This is musique concrète via dark wave in the 1980s. It appears on Black Celebration, which began a run of Depeche Mode masterpieces that continued into the early 1990s.

“People Are People” (1984)

This industrial hit from Some Great Reward gets its groove from a clanking rhythm of samples. “We used to go into studios, and the first thing we’d do, we’d ask where the kitchen was—literally for pots and pans and things that we could throw down the stairs, and record the rhythms they would make crashing around, and then make it into loops,” Gahan told Entertainment Weekly in 2023. “People Are People” is Depeche Mode transforming new wave into something gloomier. It also propelled the band into the pop mainstream as Gore’s songwriting tackled bleak themes.

I can’t understand,
What makes a man,
Hate another man,
Help me understand.

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