A single minute and four seconds of new music opens the album: a track called "The Landing," written by Michael Cretu, the man behind the electronic project Enigma. It is the door into Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits, a compilation released on 8 October 2001 by Virgin Records. The collection gathers singles and selected tracks from 1990 to 2001, and it does not behave like a typical greatest-hits package. It is a deliberate endpoint.
A decade of Enigma
Cretu had spent a decade building Enigma into one of the strangest success stories in pop music: a studio project that mixed Gregorian chant, dance beats and whispered vocals, and sold millions while its creator stayed almost invisible. By 2001, he had four studio albums behind him, each one a different shade of the same obsession. This compilation was not a label's cash-in. Cretu himself said the release marked the end of Enigma's first phase.
The tracklist makes that argument clear. It does not just recycle the biggest radio moments; it walks through the whole arc. Three pieces come from the 1990 debut MCMXC a.D., four from The Cross of Changes, four from Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!, and five from The Screen Behind the Mirror. In total, eighteen original tracks appear, plus the new single "Turn Around" and its short intro, "The Landing."
The new single and its artwork
That new single carried weight. "Turn Around" was written by Cretu with Jens Gad, a collaborator who had become central to the project's later sound. Placing a brand-new song on a greatest-hits record was a quiet statement: Enigma was not just looking back. Yet the album's artwork pulled in themes and images from previous releases, as if the project wanted to gather every thread before cutting it.
The commercial response showed how much goodwill the project still held. The compilation reached the top spot in Greece and number two in Portugal. In Germany it climbed to fourth place, and it earned a platinum certification in Canada. Even in the United States, where Enigma's strangeness had always been a tougher sell, the album made the main chart and placed fifteenth on the Top Internet Albums list.
A promise of more to come
Cretu did not frame the moment as an ending without a sequel. He promised that a second volume would follow the first. That promise mattered, because it turned the compilation from a farewell into a hinge: the first era was closing, but the project was not dead. The title itself, Love Sensuality Devotion, read like a summary of what Enigma had always chased.
The story did not stop there. Fifteen years later, the compilation was remastered and reissued with a new cover, a sign that the first phase still mattered to listeners who had found Enigma later. The old songs had not faded; they had simply been waiting on the shelf, ready to be discovered again by a new generation of collectors and curious ears.
What makes the album worth remembering is its honesty about time. A greatest-hits record usually pretends an artist is eternal. Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits did the opposite: it admitted that a chapter was over, named it, and then promised more. The final image is not a farewell, but a door marked "volume one," left open on purpose.
A greatest-hits record usually pretends an artist is eternal.