Violator!

OOF!(check out the music))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCgdWHwEnrg

Which is funny because if anything it's Roxy/Bryan Ferry who is a throughline in the actual documentary (very deft uses of "The 'In' Crowd" and "Manifesto")

Oh! I must watch that, the trailer looked fantastic.

thinking about how strange it is that this album has had a pretty limited influence on synthpop revival stuff of the last two decades, pretty everything seems to draw much more on earlier 80s synthpop?

like it's the sort of album a band could surely have a whole career ripping off but ... ?

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things; a lot of the '80s stuff people reference is softer and mushier, and besides, this album isn't an '80s album, and the band has plenty of more traditional synthpop from which people can draw. I do, however, feel Depeche Mode has become a pretty prominent songwriting influence, so they're still in the DNA of a lot of backwards-looking stuff.

Oh my @ some of these poll results. Blue Dress robbed at gunpoint. Talk about the sweetest perfection.

Violator is so sophisticated and slick, it seems harder to "borrow" from than earlier, simpler synth pop.

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things

oh yeah certainly, just that this album has such a distinct & perfect balance of things that i'm a little surprised there isn't more that's trying to capture the same sort of sound

Even Depeche Mode have struggled to recreate it!

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

Maybe it’s the songs that are difficult to recreate, though? Couple of tracks I don’t remember so well but iirc it’s wall-to-wall bangers.

Songs Of Faith.. was probably more influential than Violator (on NIN, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, etc?)

yeah its influence is way more obvious, though i've read that the influence goes both ways & they were into NIN when making it as well?

They were def. into NIN by then. "Rush" is the most obvious one. Of course "Pretty Hate Machine" was released in 1989, and also produced by Flood, just prior to "Violator," so chances are good they heard it pretty early and it might have made an impression. But then of course, "Pretty Hate Machine" clearly owes a lot to Depeche Mode.

Pretty Hate Machine is Depeche plus late 80s Ministry and that’s why it rules.

My god, it's full of samples

https://dmlive.wiki/wiki/List_of_Depeche_Mode_sample_sources_by_album/Violator

Hmm, at first I was surprised, but most of those samples are just kind of manipulated library sources, or otherwise just literally samples, in that a lot of the sounds weren't necessarily programmed or designed from scratch. Still pretty cool to learn, thanks! And yeah, some of the actual samples incorporated into this masterpiece are as inspired as they are invisible. Toni Halliday! Alan Moulder didn't engineer or mix "Violator," though, and I'm not sure they were a couple yet, so is that just a coincidence that she was (literally) in the mix?

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

true

xp yeah loads of emu library sounds but a few very interesting sources in amongst them - especially the uses of fleetwood mac, kraftwerk, and the bulgarian state female voice choir.

Very interesting to me too, a lot more samples of popular music than I expected