The phrase came from a friend during the worst stretch of Dave Gahan's life. Suffer Well, one of three songs on Playing the Angel with words by the Depeche Mode singer, grew out of something said to him while he fought addiction in the 1990s. For a man who had spent more than two decades as the voice of Martin Gore's songs, putting his own language on an album was a quiet revolution. Depeche Mode released Playing the Angel on October 17, 2005.
For a man who had spent more than two decades as the voice of Martin Gore's songs, putting his own language on an album was a quiet revolution.
Gahan's first writing credits
Playing the Angel, the eleventh studio album by Depeche Mode, arrived in the United Kingdom on 17 October 2005 through Mute Records. It was the first record where Gahan, the band's vocalist, was credited as a lyricist. He wrote the words for Suffer Well, I Want It All and Nothing's Impossible, while Christian Eigner and Andrew Phillpott composed the music for those three tracks. The album was produced by Ben Hillier, and the sessions stretched from January to July 2005. Work took place at Sound Design in Santa Barbara, Stratosphere Sound in New York and Whitfield Street in London.
The shift was not cosmetic. Gahan sang lead on almost everything, but Martin Gore, the group's main songwriter, took the microphone for the instrumental Introspectre and the tracks Macro and Damaged People. That division of labour had defined Depeche Mode for years. Now Gahan was stepping into the writing room, and the themes he brought — faith, sin, pain, suffering — sat naturally beside Gore's own concerns.
Gore's Precious and the album's sound
Gore had written Precious about how his children experienced their parents' divorce, a subject that gave the album some of its most direct emotional weight. The record sounded rawer and harder than its predecessor Exciter, with more analogue synthesizers than digital ones. Anton Corbijn, the band's longtime visual collaborator, handled the artwork, photography and cover design, giving the release a sharp, unified look. Gore also said that John the Revelator was a rebuke of belief in a punishing, cursing god. The album appeared in several formats, including a Copy Controlled CD and a deluxe SACD/DVD edition whose bonus DVD contained a documentary about the making of the record.
Not everything recorded for the project made the final cut. Martyr was judged too poppy and later appeared on The Best of Depeche Mode Volume 1. The first single, Precious, was released on 3 October 2005, two weeks before the album. In mid-July that year, an unfinished video for the song leaked online, an early sign of how much attention surrounded the record. A fourth single, John the Revelator / Lilian, followed on 4 June 2006. The deluxe edition also added a bare version of Waiting for the Night and the Precious video on iTunes.
The album received generally positive reviews from critics. Metacritic gave it 78 out of 100, while Pitchfork awarded it 7.0 out of 10, praising the record but noting it lacked innovation. Commercially, Playing the Angel made an immediate impact: it debuted at number six in the UK with 32,505 copies sold in its first week, and at number seven on the Billboard 200 in the United States with 98,000 copies. The album also topped charts in more than ten countries, and by January 2007 its worldwide sales outside the United States and Canada had reached 1.6 million copies. Before the tour, a special iTunes pre-order gave fans early access to tickets for most concerts, a first-time collaboration between iTunes and Ticketmaster.
A world tour, Touring the Angel, followed the release, carrying the new songs to audiences across the globe. For Depeche Mode, an electronic band that had survived the 1990s and entered a new century, the album proved that change inside the group did not have to break it. Gahan's first words on a Depeche Mode record had found their place.