10 Non Rock Albums That Rock Music Fans Love

Throughout most of their career, Martin Gore always maintained the fact that Depeche Mode be a pop band before anything else. These guys were cut from the same new wave cloth that birthed bands like Duran Duran, and they were never afraid to mess with their sound when the time called for it. In an era when most '80s bands fell by the wayside though, Violator was pop music that just happened to be dipped in goth rock.

Using the same playbook that the Cure were used to, much of this album seems indebted to the darker side of life, like the complicated views of religion on Personal Jesus or the smash single Waiting for the Silence having one of the most morose chord sequences of any hit song from that era. Even with some of the more pop sensibilities, you can also hear the band willing to experiment with something a bit more noisy as well, with the synthetic sounds of a song like Clean borrowing more than a few pages out of the more industrial side of music that was coming out around this time.

For all of the pop background that they had though, you can hear the band itching to get the same respect of rock and rollers here, having an attention to detail to coat songs in the blackest tone possible. When you listen to a song like Sweetest Perfection, Dave Gahan could either be talking about romance or drug abuse, but chances are the attitude would be exactly the same.