Memento Mori landed on 24 March 2023, and it's a proper landmark record for Depeche Mode - their fifteenth studio album, and the first made without founding member Andy Fletcher, who died suddenly in May 2022. It's also their longest gap between albums, six years on from Spirit, so there was a lot riding on it. What could easily have felt like a stopgap or a tribute record instead turned out to be one of their most focused and well received outings in decades, made by Dave Gahan and Martin Gore essentially as a duo for the first time.

Sonically it sits right in that classic Depeche Mode sweet spot - moody, synth-driven and a bit gothic round the edges, but never wallowing. There's a real fusion of industrial textures and delicate melody running through it, with producer James Ford bringing a slightly off-kilter, weird edge to some of the arrangements. Given the album's title and the circumstances around it, death and mortality hang over a lot of the lyrics, but the overall feel is warmer and more life-affirming than you'd expect, closer in spirit to their mid-period classics than to anything they'd done this century.

Ghosts Again is the obvious entry point - melancholy and joyful all at once, and one of their best singles in years. My Cosmos Is Mine opens the record on a suitably ominous, hypnotic note, while Caroline's Monkey is one of the strangest and most compelling things here, all nervous energy and odd little turns of phrase. Speak to Me closes things out beautifully too, starting almost like a hymn before dissolving into a wall of noise. It's the kind of album that rewards patience and repeat listens rather than instant gratification, which is exactly why it's stuck around - it feels like a proper, considered piece of work rather than a victory lap, and given everything the band had just been through, that's no small thing.