The Singles Jukebox

The campiest dirge you’ll hear this year.

[Video][Website]
[4.27]

Alfred Soto: Electronic acts know the secret truth: hips don’t lie. When Depeche Mode were the biggest boy band in the world for teens whose idea of strangelove and master and servant was Donnie Wahlberg fucking Joey with a police baton, they specialized in grinding beats on the safe side of the shimmy (can’t have a riot in Dodger Stadium, you know). Their last surprising single was 2005’s “Precious.” Now they confuse beats with being beat. 
[3]

Iain Mew: Do you like choruses? ‘Cause this hasn’t got one! It has a steam powered modem going “bvvvm-ba-bvvvvm” a bit instead, only less memorable than that makes it sound. Yet an absence is better than an aberrance, and the oozing verses and their slow drip into despair are enough that I kind of like it overall. Still, “renders Hurts exactly as pointless as predicted” is not the kind of low bar that “Dream On” or even “Precious” had to aim for.
[6]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This is hella corny. .
[1]

Brad Shoup: This sounds like… I’m gonna say George Harrison demoing The The’s Mind Bomb. Chintzy drum-machine architecture, sour puttering programming, ludicrous block chords… it’s so gauche I must reward it. To a point. 
[6]

Anthony Easton: The first minute or so of this, and the last thirty seconds, cut down, and then extended/remixed into a swampy boil would be really interesting
[4]

Edward Okulicz: As bad as “Wrong,” but half as funny. Did they plug their instruments in properly, or is that horrible feedback noise deliberate? Dave Gahan’s pained emo-face in the video does a fantastic job in conveying just how hard Depeche Mode are trying here, while simultaneously also conveying nothing but complete failure.
[2]

Ian Mathers: Hey, unlike much ‘cooler’ semi-contemporary Nick Cave, at least these guys are still listenable. Actually, this is pretty enjoyable in a slow-burn kind of way, especially the way the mostly-digital production seems to fray towards the end. And may I suggest that if Gahan’s crooning seems a bit melodramatic, you probably aren’t down with Depeche Mode’s whole metier in the first place?
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Depeche Mode fanfiction by E. L. James. 
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Here’s an overly specific comparison: the intro to this sounds like the bassline from Portishead’s “Glory Box” has been fiddled with to make it sound like it’s about to segue right into the opening lines of “Secret Smile” by Semisonic. It doesn’t (although that would be good), instead lurching, lurching, lurching all the way through to the end of the first sort-of-chorus, where the weight of all the song’s well-sold miserablism is lifted – not an alleviation, but as if it were a trophy, a sardonic celebration of the fact that this really isn’t the kind of heaven most would wish for.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: That lulling drum machine, that rolling piano-and-bass fugue, Dave Gahan sounding like Dave Gahan’s hyper-dramatic ass: the new DM moves at its own damn pace and makes sure you know it. If you can imagine a New Orleans funeral dirge, you wouldn’t be too far off from gauging the feel of “Heaven”, an idiosyncratic slowie that meshes analog and digital to spread the sense of reckoning approaching. It’s in the title – a request for spiritual awakening or/and closure. Gahan makes a point to deliver Christ complexes through his lyrics, which fits with the morose tone, but the music may just be the void that he warns us of. By the end, it has swallowed everything around it whole. “Heaven” just crumbles.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Enjoy the ZZZZZZZZZ.
[1]