“Never Let Me Down Again” by Depeche Mode

"Never Let Me Down Again" finds Depeche Mode doing something they'd rarely done before: leaning on a strong guitar riff. The song came out on 24 August 1987 as the second single from Music for the Masses, their sixth album, on Mute, and it's a dark, stately surge of synth-pop that sounds like it's going somewhere it shouldn't.

Martin Gore wrote it, Alan Wilder arranged it, and the band produced it with David Bascombe, with Daniel Miller adding production. They recorded it in Paris and London and mixed it in Denmark. Gore's lyric is about a narrator running from addiction, and Dave Gahan sings it with a cool, almost serene menace, over samples lifted from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

It wasn't a big chart hit at first, but it became a fixture of their concerts, and later found new ears through the soundtracks of The Last of Us and Euphoria. The Smashing Pumpkins covered it for the 1998 tribute album For the Masses.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.