Memento Mori (stylised as "Memento|Mori" on the album cover) is the fifteenth studio album by Depeche Mode (stylised as "|Mode" on the album cover), released on 24 March 2023 through Columbia. The album was produced by James Ford.
It was preceded by the single "Ghosts Again" on 9 February and the track "My Cosmos Is Mine" on 9 March (released on streaming platforms) as well as the single "Wagging Tongue" released on 7 July, and is the first Depeche Mode studio album to be recorded and released as a duo, after the death of co-founder and keyboardist Andy Fletcher on 26 May 2022. The album is promoted by the Memento Mori World Tour.
Background
Andy Fletcher died suddenly of an aortic dissection on 26 May 2022. Although songwriting and demo work on the album began prior to Fletcher's death, Dave Gahan stated in an interview with NME that Fletcher did not record nor hear any material for the album. In the same NME interview, Martin Gore also explained how Richard Butler ended up co-writing four songs for the album. In April 2020, Butler reached out to Gore to write songs together. He sent some lyrics, Gore added the music, and they went back and forth.
Gore said the songs were too good to be a side project, and so Depeche Mode put them on the album although Butler was never going to join the band.
"Martin sent me about six songs, and Richard Butler was singing on a few of them," Gahan recalled. "I was like, '...The fuck is this?' Then Martin explained that during COVID he and Richard had written some songs together. I don’t care who wrote them, but they were some great songs.”
The theme of death within the album came about due to Gore thinking about his own mortality, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, which was killing hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world while he was writing the album.
Though death is a dominant theme in the album, there are some songs which reflect other themes such as "My Cosmos Is Mine" which Martin discussed was written "shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. I thought, “How much more are we supposed to endure?” What else is expected of us?” And my first reaction was to say: I’m retreating into my own little world, everyone leave me alone. The song is about protecting your inner self in the midst of powerlessness against the storms of the world and wanting to hide somewhere together with your loved one. Which is of course short-sighted, because we have to take responsibility for our earth, otherwise we will all soon no longer be here."
Dave Gahan said that "My Favourite Stranger" is "about having a shadow, someone who follows you around the clock and tells you things. Do you listen to the lie or to the truth? A fun and a little risky song. With music you need to be transported to different places, sometimes it's places that are right in front of your eyes, other times it's open spaces." He also said "this is a direct song, like Suicide's Alan Vega, it has a New York '70s punk vibe."
The album closer, "Speak to Me" which Gahan said wasn't referring to "any of the leaders that we have right now. I'm talking about something that is not a person, but our conscience. I believe that we always know what the right thing to do is, and are given the possibility of choice, but we invariably end up making the wrong choices. Normally, we choose a path that serves our interests best. That's human, of course. But I think in that song I was trying to ask for something by saying: if there is something out there, show me and I will follow. It's me trying to summon something bigger."
Recording
There were initial doubts that the album would even go through. Gore had debated whether to carry on with the album, saying, "I did question for a second whether it was a good idea to carry on with the schedule we had... because we were due to start in the studio six weeks after he died, and I wondered if we should put that back a little bit. But we decided it was probably best for us to focus on the album, on the music, something we know, something to take our minds off Andy's death." Gahan said that "for a minute" he was convinced that Depeche Mode was over. Gore said that the loss of their bandmate had brought them closer together, saying. "I think that the one thing that's come out of Andy's dying that's possibly, you know, positive... There's nothing positive about it. But you know, the one good thing is that it's brought me and Dave closer. We have to make decisions as the two of us, so we talk things out, we talk a lot more on the phone, even FaceTime sometimes. That's something we just never did before."