“Strangelove” by Depeche Mode

"Strangelove" was the lead single from Music for the Masses, Depeche Mode's sixth studio album, and it arrived in 1987 sounding like a band that had stopped asking permission. Martin Gore wrote it, words and music, and Dave Gahan sings it with a sly, crooning menace over a clanking, glinting bed of synths and machine beats.

The band produced it with David Bascombe, who also engineered, and Daniel Miller added production of his own.

It travelled well: a peak of 16 in the UK, runner-up spots in West Germany and South Africa, and top-20 placings in Ireland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. In America it only got as far as number 50 on the Hot 100, but it topped the US dance club chart for three weeks, the first of nine times the band would get there, and the band came to see it as the record that finally opened the American door for them after years of struggling to get through it.

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