Rock band Depeche Mode is back with its first new song since the death of founding member Andy Fletcher last year.
Remaining band members Dave Gahan and Martin Gore dropped new song “Ghosts Again” – the lead single off their new album “Memento Mori” – on Thursday, along with a haunting black-and-white music video.
Gahan said on the Depeche Mode website this week that the song “captures this perfect balance of melancholy and joy.”
The video shows Gahan and Gore walking in black cloaks while clutching canes that feature gleaming skulls as the handles. In an apparent nod to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” the pair sit down for a game of chess as the camera focuses on the metallic skulls.
“Memento Mori” will be Depeche Mode’s fifteenth studio album, and their first to be recorded and released as a duo following keyboardist Fletcher’s passing at the age of 60 in May 2022.
Gore, who along with Gahan will be going on tour beginning next month in support of the album, told Live Nation in October that the band had “started work” on the new record “early in the pandemic, and its themes were directly inspired by that time.”
He added that after Fletcher’s death, “we decided to continue as we’re sure this is what he would have wanted, and that has really given the project an extra level of meaning.”
Speaking to NME around the same time, Gahan noted that while work on “Memento Mori” began before Fletcher’s death, the late musician did not record any material for the album.
“Memento Mori” will be released on March 24.