Ghosts Again
Ghosts Again
A song about endings that somehow sounds like a beginning.
The reason
this one stays.
When Depeche Mode returned in 2023, they did it with a song that felt immediately familiar without sounding like a museum piece. “Ghosts Again” carries the elegant melancholy people associate with the band, but there is light moving through it too.
Inside the file.
The track arrived as the first single from Memento Mori and the first new Depeche Mode single issued after Andy Fletcher’s death. The album title and much of the record’s writing pre-dated that loss, so the song should not be reduced to a memorial. What changed was the way listeners inevitably heard it: mortality, time and disappearance were suddenly impossible to separate from the band’s own story.
“Ghosts Again” is unusual in the catalogue because Martin Gore shares the songwriting credit with Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs. James Ford produced the recording, with Marta Salogni engineering, additional programming and the final mix. The official archive lists sessions in California, New York and London, which fits the track’s polished but slightly haunted scale.
Anton Corbijn’s video makes the mood explicit without over-explaining it. Dave Gahan and Martin Gore move through stark monochrome imagery, including a chess-game reference to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. It is theatrical, restrained and very Depeche Mode: death is present, but style never leaves the room.
Three things
to notice.
How bright the central synth motif is against the subject matter. The sadness is not painted in black from start to finish.
The way Gahan’s vocal stays controlled rather than melodramatic; the restraint makes the song feel more final.
The guitar and synth details that keep the arrangement moving while the lyric circles around time, loss and return.
What makes it
interesting now.
The most interesting thing about “Ghosts Again” is the tension between what the song says and what the record does. It talks about vanishing, yet it announced that Depeche Mode were still moving forward. That contradiction is why it worked so well as the opening statement of the Memento Mori era.