Happy 25th Anniversary to Depeche Mode’s ninth studio album Ultra, originally released April 14, 1997.
Depeche Mode’s 1997 LP Ultra is widely regarded as the album the band made when it was falling apart. In fact, that falling apart is so much a part of the band’s and the album’s lore that it’s the subject of an entire documentary titled Depeche Mode 1995-98 (Oh Well, That’s the End of The Band).
Depeche Mode didn’t fall apart, though. Multi-instrumentalist Alan Wilder left the band, while singer Dave Gahan wrestled with heroin addiction, nearly dying of an overdose while Depeche Mode was still in the process of recording. Gahan rallied, however, using the overdose as a catalyst for recovery and ultimately finishing the record, which catapulted the band into its next phase.
Nonetheless, at the time it was released, Ultra was widely regarded by the music press—via lackluster three-star reviews—as an album Depeche Mode threw together, even though it took 13 months to make. I was in college at the time of its release—or rather busy preparing for my first semester of college—when all of this Depeche Mode news was unfolding, so I was oblivious to the drama. But I loved Ultra.
Growing up in Germany as an American army brat, I had been an enthusiastic yet casual Depeche Mode fan. Depeche Mode were somewhat ubiquitous in Germany and throughout Europe—I think more so than in the United States—and you didn’t have to go very far to hear one of their songs in an ice-cream parlor or a clothing store or at a skating rink. I was in elementary and middle school at the height of Depeche Mode’s popularity in the mid-to-late ’80s, and so they weren’t my band in the way that bands I discovered in high school were my bands. Depeche Mode was the band of my babysitters or my friends’ older sisters, even though these girls were probably about as naïve as I was about the BDSM of “Strangelove,” or about the supposed homoeroticism of “Never Let Me Down Again.”
Later, when I was finally old enough to understand those things, I distinctly remember hearing “It’s No Good” from Ultra for the first time when I was out somewhere in Germany—it might have been a nightclub, but it’s more likely it was an ordinary café. “Oh my god, what’s that song?” I asked. “Depeche Mode,” my friend Kara said. I’m not sure why it hit me so hard, but “It’s No Good” had that quality—in this case dark and twirling and dangerous—that just immediately burrows under your skin, or into your soul, and I knew I had to own it right then. And so I went to the local Kaufhof that day in 1997 and bought the CD, listening to “It’s No Good” approximately 100 times on repeat that night.
Mostly, though, I associate Ultra with traveling through Eastern Europe. On my longer breaks from college in Pennsylvania, when I would fly home to Germany, I’d invite my American roommates to visit me, partly because they were curious about where I had grown up, but also because I knew my parents were more likely to foot the bill for travel if it was in the name of showing people around. I had already traveled all over Western Europe as a child and teenager, but after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I hadn’t explored Eastern Europe as much as I would have liked to. In all honesty, it had taken the first chunk of the ‘90s for Eastern Europe to become westernized enough to make for pleasant travel.
My dad was the obvious choice as the person to take us—my roommates Melissa, Christine, and me—to Prague and Budapest over Christmas break that first year. After my parents’ divorce, only a few years after the fall of communism, my dad had joined some sort of matchmaking service—it might have even been an early dating site—that introduced Western men to newly liberated Czech women. The whole thing now seems very sugar daddy/sugar baby, or mail-order bride. But I suppose it made sense to my dad at the time. (“Erika, that was my male menopause—my mid-life crisis,” my dad has told me recently.)
Anyway, my dad had developed long-term, long-distance relationships at separate times with two of the women he met (both were very lovely and kind), and had, during the course of these relationships, learned quite a bit of the Czech language. So that’s why I had chosen him as our chauffeur/tour guide. What I hadn’t prepared for was that, after the last breakup with the last Czech woman Vera, my dad had become born-again in his Catholicism, and seemed to be having a bit of a nervous breakdown. My parents’ divorce, overall, was very hard on him.
So, as we drove through Eastern Europe, in order to avoid religious discussion and conversion, Melissa, Christine, and I kept our headphones on for much of the ride. Ultra was one of the 10 or so CDs I had with me, and I put it into constant rotation. It wasn’t one of those albums that kept knocking you over the head with hits; instead, it was an album you could get lost in. Something about its unapologetic darkness, the way it completely enveloped me in that car, was like a warm security blanket. It also matched the black, soot-covered buildings of Budapest and Prague; the still dark-and-dreary clothing and dour, distrusting expressions of the Eastern Europeans; and the gunmetal-gray of winter. Ultra was a gloomy, goth, industrial album, and it fit the backdrop, and my state of mind, perfectly.
Later, when I would finally see the video for “It’s No Good” on MTV or VH1, it struck me as strange and uncanny how it seemed to mimic an Eastern European aesthetic. The video opens outside a seedy club on a dark city street, the cars parked outside short and compact like Trabis. Suddenly, we’re inside the club, decorated shabbily with cheap silver tinsel, and the emcee, heavy with accent, incorrectly introduces the song as “It’s Too Good.” Everyone is dressed in throwback ‘70s clothes, but in a shabby, threadbare manner that suggests they might just be very behind on the times—which is the way it was in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
The desperation hinted at in the grimy, stuck-in-time ”It’s No Good” video had been playing out in Dave Gahan’s own life. While recording “Sister of Night,” my second favorite track on the album, Gahan was so dope sick he could barely sing at that point. “’Sister of Night’ took almost a week to do the vocals, purely because Dave was just not well and it was hard to get a consistent performance,” programmer Kerry Hopwood said in the documentary. Ironically, the vocals are the standout of the song—they’re hauntingly gorgeous, alternately floating and soaring, and they’re the reason I love it so much. “We had to go almost syllable by syllable at times,” Hopwood said. “I get goosey now, just thinking about what Dave went through to get that track done. In retrospect, I think you’ve got one of the most beautiful vocals.”
Meanwhile, in order to make up for Alan Wilder’s absence, the band were hiring session musicians to fill in instrumentation on some of the songs. For example, Doug Wimbash provided bass on “Useless,” while BJ Cole played pedal steel guitar on “The Bottom Line” to give it a bit of a country feel. “We used it as an opportunity to hire people we wanted to work with,” Martin Gore said.
The band also made a conscious decision to take an electronic Violator (1990) approach as opposed to the more rock-heavy approach of other previous albums. “Daniel Miller [owner of Depeche Mode’s label Mute Records] said, ‘Lads, put everything through a valve,’” Hopwood recalls. “So, we went and bought a valve, and then decided he had a point. We were putting everything through a preamp.”
There’s a sonic fullness to Ultra, and it can be heard as early as the first song “Barrel of a Gun,” which starts out with a helicopter-like spinning, and then dissolves into lush, resounding beats and penetrating, metallic vocals. “’Barrel of a Gun,’ for me, was Dave’s story of his then well-published overdoses and the whole drug period,” Anton Corbijn, who directed the video, said in the documentary. Corbijn shot the opening scenes in a flat in England, depicting a druggy, rock-star lifestyle, with Gahan languishing in bed, lying in a bathtub, and crawling down the stairs. In another scene, bandmates Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher are asleep at a table while Gahan sits between them in a manic state. “They were, I think, asleep really while all this happened to Dave,” Corbijn said. “Nobody really interfered much.”
Gore admitted as much. “I don’t know that much about heroin,” he said. “So I never knew when he was on it, when he was off it, when he was trying to be off it. So as far as I was aware, he was off it.”
Hopwood speculates that even though Gore says he never writes songs about the band itself, the song “Home” is about his friendship with Gahan. “Here is a page / From the emptiest stage / A cage or the heaviest cross ever made / A gauge of the deadliest trap ever made”—it paints a picture of a dire situation, not unlike an addiction. And yet the song then shifts to gratitude— “And I thank you / For bringing me here / For showing me home / For singing these tears.” It also implies that the person singing the tears is “the only true friend / I call mine.”
Listening from my own perspective, the song was filled with a hard-to-pin down homesickness that spoke not only to my melancholy over my childhood “home” no longer being the same after my parents’ divorce, but also to the fact that what had brought my family to Europe in the ’70s—the Cold War—was really now a thing of the past, evidenced in part by a McDonald’s in Prague. The end of the Cold War was, of course, mostly a positive thing politically, but it also meant that the army bases I grew up on would probably soon shut down (they did) and that I would no longer be able to visit Europe—home—as easily and frequently after my parents left. And that turned out to be true as well.
Of his departure from the band, Wilder said, “I thought we had achieved a lot and, you know, there were plenty of other things I wanted to do. I wanted to have a change really, and I had just sort of gotten fed up with everything.” So, like Depeche Mode coming to terms with an end of an era after the departure of their longtime bandmate—that specific grief is palpable on the album, in addition to the band’s other struggles—I was coming to terms with the end of an era of my own. Maybe because of that, I see Ultra as speaking to a wider zeitgeist.
Ultimately, I don’t think Ultra suffered from the band’s struggles, as the narrative at the time claimed. Instead, I think the band poured those struggles into its sound and used them to create relatable themes and a distinctive, albeit heavier mood. That’s what artists—particularly seasoned artists like Depeche Mode—do. Ultra is more ambient and atmospheric than the band’s other more upbeat, hit-packed releases, but that doesn’t make it less than—only different. “[Ultra] got more press than almost any record than they’ve ever done, but for all the wrong reasons,” label owner Daniel Miller observed. “In that sense, I think it was overlooked.”
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