Of course, a synth-pop band putting anything on rock radio was news in 1990. But in 1990 it was still new and emerging in New Jack Swing and a new generation of teen idols informed by hip-hop and Prince. That fusion of big personalities and voices and feelings over tiny, tricky rhythm elements is-from Michael Jackson to Timbaland to Timberlake-something we now enjoy and know frequently to be a hallmark of A-list pop music. That cocktail of darkness and boredom became prominently conveyed in chief songwriter Gore and lead singer David Gahan's vocals: Increasingly languid and despairing, and even sexy, these were broad feelings dripping across the most intricate, microscopically threaded sound patterns in multi-platinum rock.
In 1990, he told SPIN he started attending church because "there was nothing else to do on a Sunday." The story laid out by "Blasphemous Rumours" wasn’t particularly deep, but the suicide-Martin Gore's sister's-was real, and the images he relayed spoke for themselves. Just trace the pattern from 1981's straight-up bouncy "Just Can’t Get Enough" through "People Are People"'s industrial clang and before the decade's even half over you end up at the one about the girl who survives slashing her wrists at 16 to get hit by a car two years later. They saw a few tides turning the synth-pop group's absolutely cutthroat string of charting European singles (and the occasional American hit, like "People Are People") became increasingly less bubblegum.
I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but I think that Depeche Mode had an exit strategy for the 1980s.
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