Happy 25th: Depeche Mode, Violator

25 years ago today, Depeche Mode released an album which wasn’t their most successful from a chart placement standpoint but remains by far the most successful studio album in their discography.

Depeche Mode was the textbook definition of a band that built its U.S. success slowly but surely, making chart inroads single by single, album by album. Their commercial breakthrough in America began with 1984’s “People are People,” which made it to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100, but when the follow-up single, “Master and Servant,” only struggled as far as #87, it seemed as though mainstream audiences were destined to pigeonhole them as being no more significant than, say, Kajagoogoo or Dexy’s Midnight Runners. (We make those references with all due respect to the artists, you understand. We’re just trying to paint a picture here.)

But something changed with 1987’s Music for the Masses, an appropriate title if there ever was one. While Depeche Mode didn’t pull any top-40 singles from the album, they did score three top-100 hits (“Strangelove,” “Never Let Me Down Again,” and “Behind the Wheel”), and when they toured behind the album, the crowds went wild, as evidenced in the concert film 101. As such, when the first single for Violator was dropped in August 1989, both MTV and radio were primed and ready to spread the gospel of “Personal Jesus.”

Unsurprisingly, “Personal Jesus” did prove to be a top-40 hit, but the more important accomplishment came with the album’s next single, “Enjoy the Silence,” which became Depeche Mode’s first – and, to date, only – top-10 single in America, hitting #8. The follow-up, “Policy of Truth,” made it to #15, and while “World in My Eyes,” which followed in its footsteps, only made it to #52, it was hard to complain about the overall success of the album’s singles.

To give you an idea of where the band’s popularity level was when Violator was released, they tried to hold an album signing in Los Angeles, but when the event drew the better part of 20,000 attendees, the record store reasonably felt that the situation was too unsafe to hold the signing, a decision which practically caused a riot. As such, it’s not entirely surprising that Violator ultimately went triple platinum, but it’s nice to know that the love wasn’t short-lived: even now, it’s generally described as one of Depeche Mode’s definitive albums.