Depeche Mode "Violator"

Violator is the seventh studio album by English electronic music band Depeche Mode. It was released on 19 March 1990 by Mute Records. Preceded by the singles "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence" (a top-10 entry in both the United Kingdom and the United States), Violator propelled the band into international stardom. The album yielded two further commercially successful singles, "Policy of Truth" and "World in My Eyes".

Violator reached number two on the UK Albums Chart, and is the band's first album to chart inside the top 10 of the Billboard 200, peaking at number seven. The album was supported by the World Violation Tour.

Compared to previous efforts, the band decided to try a new approach to recording. Alan Wilder said, "Usually we begin the making of a record by having extensive pre-production meetings where we decide what the record will actually sound like, then go into a programming studio. This time we decided to keep all pre-production work to a minimum. We were beginning to have a problem with boredom in that we felt we'd reached a certain level of achievement in doing things a certain way." Martin Gore elaborated, "Over the last five years I think we'd perfected a formula; my demos, a month in a programming studio, etc. etc. We decided that our first record of the '90s ought to be different."

With co-producer Mark "Flood" Ellis, Wilder began a complementary working relationship, with Flood able to provide the technical know-how and Wilder working on the arrangements and song textures. "That's how we made the group work at that time", clarified Wilder, "by accepting that we all had different roles and not actually all trying to do the same thing. So we ended up with this unwritten agreement in the band, where we'd all throw together a few ideas at the beginning of a track. Then Fletch and Mart would go away, and they'd come back after we'd worked on it for a while to give an opinion."

There was also a notable change in Gore's demos. After the rigid, limiting effects of almost-finished demos for Music for the Masses, Gore, agreeing to Wilder's request, kept them less complete this time around. Several of the basic recordings consisted of vocals over a simple guitar or organ part, with the odd percussion loop, but less sequenced material. The sparse demos allowed the band to take creative liberties with the songs. For instance, "Enjoy the Silence" started out as a slow ballad, but at Wilder's suggestion became a pulsating, up-tempo track.

The band convened to work on the record with Flood at Mute's WorldWide programming room in London for three weeks after which they flew to Milan for the new sessions at Logic studios. According to Flood, they didn't do a substantial amount of work in Milan, except for the song "Personal Jesus", which was crucial in setting the tone and spirit of the album. "Everybody was feeling each other out, because they wanted to try working in a different way. The idea was to work hard and party hard and we all enjoyed ourselves to the full." After Milan the band relocated to Puk studios in northern Denmark, where most of the album was recorded.

Martin called the track "World in My Eyes" a very positive song. "It's saying that love and sex and pleasure are positive things." The song "Blue Dress", which Gore called "pervy", is simply about "watching a girl dress and realising that this is 'what makes the world turn.'" With "Halo", Gore said, "I'm saying 'let's give in to this' but there's also a real feeling of wrongfulness [...] I suppose my songs do seem to advocate immorality but if you listen there's always a sense of guilt." The closing track, "Clean", was inspired by Pink Floyd's song "One of These Days", from their 1971 album Meddle. Said Wilder, "they [Pink Floyd] were doing something very different to anyone else at that time – you can hear electronics in there, and the influence of classical music. It's got a very repetitive, synthesised sound, and the bass riffs with the echo have a very hypnotic groove that underpins it. We basically nicked that idea [for 'Clean']".

Regarding the album's title, Martin said, "We called it Violator as a joke. We wanted to come up with the most extreme, ridiculously Heavy Metal title that we could. I'll be surprised if people will get the joke."

As a sign of their rising popularity when Violator was released, a signing party for fans at a Wherehouse record store in Los Angeles that was expected to draw only a few thousand fans ended up drawing around 17,000. The band were forced to withdraw from the event due to security concerns, and their early exit nearly caused a riot. Violator reached number 17 on the Billboard 200 year-end chart of 1990, and was the first Depeche Mode album to sell a million copies in the United States.

The success of Violator introduced the band to a wider audience, and this increased exposure led to their 1993 follow-up album Songs of Faith and Devotion debuting atop the charts in both the United States and United Kingdom. "Before this, we'd been going along quite nicely," recalled Andy Fletcher. "Then when it came to Violator we inexplicably went huge. It was just incredible, and in many ways we never really recovered from that. After that, we just felt like we wanted to muck it up a bit."

Track listing

All tracks are written by Martin L. Gore.

1. "World in My Eyes" 4:26
2. "Sweetest Perfection" 4:43
3. "Personal Jesus" 4:56
4. "Halo" 4:30
5. "Waiting for the Night" 6:07
6. "Enjoy the Silence" 6:12
7. "Policy of Truth" 4:55
8. "Blue Dress" 5:41
9. "Clean" 5:32

Total length: 47:02

"Enjoy the Silence" includes the hidden track "Interlude #2 (Crucified)" starting at 4:21.

"Blue Dress" includes the hidden track "Interlude #3" starting at 4:18.

According to the band's website, the original title for "Waiting for the Night" was "Waiting for the Night to Fall" and the rest of the title was omitted due to a printing error.

Both the original US and the original UK vinyl editions have a shorter version of "Personal Jesus".