Leave it to Martin Gore to make a monkey out of all of us. While most artists were baking sourdough or panic-Tweeting during lockdown, the Depeche Mode mastermind decided it was the perfect time to embrace the screeching void and release an instrumental EP inspired by, well, monkeys. Titled The Third Chimpanzee, the record plays like the soundtrack to a dystopian jungle rave—one where you can’t decide if you're supposed to dance or apologize to a bonobo.
“It started with a track called ‘Howler’ that had manipulated vocals sounding more like a monkey than a human,” Gore explained, in his delightfully casual British cadence. “So I named it after a monkey, and it just went from there.” Before long, he had a whole EP named after primates and even got a literal monkey—Pockets Warhol, a Canadian sanctuary resident with a paintbrush—to do the cover art. “That,” Gore said with a smirk, “was probably the stroke of genius.”
Of course, the whole monkey-meets-modular-synth setup isn’t just for laughs. Gore, who’s been spiritually allergic to complacency since the ‘80s, found the chaos of the Trump years deeply affecting—so much so that he turned off his news alerts. “I was living in a constant state of panic,” he confessed. “My phone would go off every half hour and I’d think, ‘Oh God, what’s he done now?’”
The EP doesn’t have lyrics, but it doesn’t need them. Gore sees the instrumentals as commentary—moody, twitchy dispatches from a species slowly eating its own tail. “It does feel like devolution is happening,” he said. “Even if I wasn’t writing lyrics, I felt like I should still say something.”
Gore has always been a sponge for sound and sentiment, sucking up everything from doo-wop to gospel to blues and shoving it through a digital meat grinder. It’s why even his coldest synth lines pulse with soul. “People think electronic music is inherently cold, but it doesn’t have to be,” he said. “You can still capture the soul of something—even if it starts out as zeros and ones.”
And while Gore has embraced technology in every iteration, he’s not entirely sold on AI-driven music creation. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said. “Anyone can make music now, which is great—but that also means everyone is making music. And a lot of it is really bad.”
Still, Gore is playing nice with the future. Depeche Mode recently collaborated on “sound wave art” that visualizes their songs in sculptural form to benefit a charity that builds free music studios for kids. It’s an oddly poetic parallel to the primate painter who did his latest solo cover—two ends of the spectrum: the AI-generated and the banana-smeared.
As for The Third Chimpanzee, there are remixes on the way (“We asked 10 people, expecting to reject a few… but they were all great”), and the vinyl version looks, in Gore’s words, “amazing.” He’s still vague on who’s doing the remixes, but rest assured, you’ll be able to groove to techno-apes soon enough.
Depeche Mode is a band that continues to feel vital, not despite their age but because of it. They’ve been around long enough to see history repeat itself—usually with fewer clothes and worse taste. And through it all, they’ve made the panic danceable.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
