Some obsessions take time. This one took forty years — long enough for an idea to become inevitable.
It begins in early 1981, in front of a French television screen. The video for Just Can’t Get Enough plays for the first time. An unknown group, a punk new wave look, a melody that refuses to let go. Depeche Mode had just entered a life, uninvited.
Years later, after founding Nouvelle Vague and reinventing the post-punk repertoire through the lens of bossa nova, the idea took shape: dedicate an entire album to the catalogue of a single iconic group. The Strange as Angels project, built around The Cure’s catalogue with singer Chrystabell, had already explored this territory. But it was Depeche Mode — the most emblematic band of the eighties — that emerged as the natural first choice to open a new collection.
After an exhaustive re-listening of their catalogue and a selection of around twenty tracks, a Nouvelle Vague concert in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024 gave the album its direction.
Recording took place in February 2025 at the studio of the legendary Liminha, a defining figure of Os Mutantes, with Brazilian musicians who instinctively understood the connection between the melancholy of new wave and that of bossa nova. Bass, drums, guitars, percussion — the rhythmic foundations of the album were laid by the Atlantic. A Brazilian arranger wrote brass arrangements for two tracks. Back in Paris, keyboards, accordions and Jérôme Pichon’s guitars completed the picture.
For the vocals, Nouvelle Vague returned to its original formula: one singer, one song. The cast matches the ambition. Skye Edwards, the voice of Morcheeba, opens the album with Enjoy the Silence and Personal Jesus. Beth Hirsch takes on It’s a Question of Lust. Brazilian singer Flavia Coelho performs Never Let Me Down Again. Nouvelle Vague veterans Mélanie Pain and Phoebe Killdeer interpret Only when I Lose Myself and Halo respectively. Swedish singer Fredrika Stahl takes Shake the Disease, Turkish singer Nedime Girisken Leave in Silence, Franco-Mexican Eva de Marce Stripped and a new version of Just Can’t Get Enough. Lily Oaks and Morenike perform Behind the Wheel and Any Second Now. And by superstition — thirteen tracks, like Nouvelle Vague’s debut album — New Zealand singer Lisa Crawley closes the album with Ice Machine.
With artwork by designer Clara Kerneis, A Date with Depeche Mode will be released in October 2026. It is the first chapter of a new collection — and a new beginning, more than twenty years in the making.
