On their most engaged album in a quarter-century, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan find that familiar sounds can offer several new ways forward.

Depeche Mode had nearly finished their fourth full decade and 14th full-length before a Martin Gore-Dave Gahan cowrite finally made an album. That was “You Move,” a throbbing bit of tossed-off electro pop nestled near the center of 2017’s Spirit, a political quagmire of topical indignation. Amid that sloganeering, “You Move” was not an entirely auspicious debut, notable mostly for how it framed Gahan and Gore’s threadbare relationship. During those sessions, third member and interstitial glue, Andy Fletcher, had to be physically removed from the studio so his more famous former chums could freely vent. “If you give me something you and I can play,” Gahan soon taunted on their song together. “Let me ring your bell.”

The pair’s second cowrite, though, feels less like an obligation or a marriage-counseling exercise than the dawn of a new dynamic. “Wagging Tongue” arrives early into Memento Mori, the band’s most engaged album in more than two decades, Gore’s sunbeam sequencers a perfect foil for his golden-voice goth. It’s an elliptical tale of risk, alienation, and—slowly, unsteadily, improbably—renewal. “I won’t be persuaded,” they sing together near the end, Gore’s harmony as wavy as his totemic golden hair. “Kiss your doubts goodbye.”

The doubts that Memento Mori would even exist were enormous. Just before the trio reconvened in Gore’s Santa Barbara studio (and only after Gahan overcame his entrenched reluctance to reconvene at all), Fletcher died suddenly at home in London, the primary vessel from his heart having ripped apart. Fletcher, only 60, had been the band’s indispensable “vibe tech,” the oil inside its hot engine. Though he didn’t write or really even play, Fletcher served as the intermediary for the often acrimonious pair who did, especially when Gahan began itching to put songs of his own on Depeche Mode’s Gore-penned albums. Without him, they wondered, could they function without falling apart? “We kind of had to… really decide, are we going to finish?” Gore recently told MOJO. “Or do we carry on?” They chose the latter, finding new ways to work together, if not discovering altogether new sounds.