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 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 Gore 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." 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 [Fletcher] 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." Gore said he never considered changing the title or dropping the song's subject matter on death and mortality following Fletcher's death. "For me, when Andy died it cemented the idea that we had to carry on with these songs and the title. The idea that we should all be making the most of our time on Earth and it's very limited—it's kind of an important message. And it's even more important now Andy's gone." The
Memento Mori sessions were, nonetheless, smooth and productive, unlike the
Spirit sessions, which were reportedly filled with a built-up hostility and tense atmosphere. Producer
James Ford was initially surprised that the band had even wanted to work with him again, stating "at the end of the process and I was like: 'Ah, that's it, I probably will not work with them again'. So I was really surprised when they asked me the second time, honestly." With regard to the songs and track listing on the final album, Ford said, "There was a period when we had like 20 tracks and we had to get them down to the album—that's always in any process a little bit fraught, especially when it's different people's songs. But Daniel Miller came in the studio around that time too. Obviously he has this relationship with them from the beginning. So it was great to have him in the studio.... We ended up doing this secret ballot of everybody's favourite tracks and that kind of thing. It actually went really smoothly. We did this kind of secret voting thing between the five of us."
Marta Salogni, the mixer of the album, felt that it was "wonderful" to witness Gore and Gahan's flourishing friendship, and the creativity it brought to the album. "With Andy being a filter—after he passed, the filter unfortunately disappeared, and suddenly the curtain dropped and they were there to face each other," she said. "Honesty comes to the forefront, and you just face what you perhaps haven't faced before." == Promotion ==