Songs of Faith and Devotion is the eighth studio album by English electronic music band Depeche Mode.

The album incorporated a more aggressive, darker rock-oriented tone than its predecessor Violator (1990), largely influenced by the emerging alternative rock and grunge scenes in the United States.

[3] Upon its release, Songs of Faith and Devotion reached number one in several countries, and became the first Depeche Mode album to debut atop the charts in both the UK and the US.

The ordeal had exhausted their creative output following the enormous success they had enjoyed with Violator, leading to rumours and media speculation that the band would split.

Depeche Mode had released their previous album Violator in early 1990 and had supported it with a world tour that lasted through the end of that year.

The band had become aware of getting caught in easy routines in the studio leading to boredom and thus wanted to change as many aspects to their approach to the recording as possible.

The introduction of the track "Judas" has uilleann pipes recorded with reversed reverberation mixed into the sound, to achieve a haunting, atmospheric feel.

Guitars were processed through devices such as Leslie tone cabinets, originally designed for organs, to achieve different sounds.

[3] Unlike the previous albums, there was very little pre-production, where the band would listen to demos created by Gore and then suggest ideas to establish a creative framework.

Due to these frustrations, the first recording batch of four weeks was largely unusable, which Wilder described as "a complete fucking waste of time" in a sarcastic toast to Flood at the airport on their way back home.

Though Wilder would say the band members had drifted as far apart as they had ever been, the emotional stress contributed to some of Depeche Mode's best tracks, including "In Your Room" and "Walking in My Shoes", which many felt were indicative of Gore's greatest works.

[3] Gahan downplayed his role on the album, stating the only thing he felt he contributed was what he considers his greatest vocal performance for "Condemnation".

Despite the feeling the band were realising one of their greatest works, Flood commented that the "little things" of the recording process never ran smoothly, leading to constant, largely non-constructive, arguing.

Conditions improved between the band when the recording sessions moved to Hamburg, largely in part as it was a return to normal studio routine, as opposed to living together.

In The Guardian, Adam Sweeting lauded Depeche Mode's musical growth on what he deemed to be an "astonishingly powerful album" and "a masterpiece", remarking that it "kills any residual notions of them being a 'synth-pop' act stone dead.

"[27] David Quantick praised it in NME as a "more obviously emotional and mature" work than the band's previous albums and concluded that "Depeche Mode are much too interesting to avoid now that they are grown up.

[19] Entertainment Weekly's Bill Wyman was less enthused, summarising the album as "thinking-teen's pop" for "tortured suburban youth" while finding that Depeche Mode "don't really have much to say" and that "their computer-based soundscapes are too limited".

[29] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Ned Raggett wrote that apart from Alan Wilder and Flood's "new sonic tricks", Songs of Faith and Devotion "sounds pretty much like a Depeche Mode album", yet "works incredibly well all the same" and "continues the Depeche Mode winning streak";[12] he ranked it at number 18 on his list of "The Top 136 or So Albums of the Nineties" for Freaky Trigger.

[30] Uncut journalist Stephen Dalton called it a "widescreen experiment in soulful self-laceration" that "lifts the Mode to a higher musical level and defies the traumatic circumstances surrounding its conception.

"[21] Similarly, Danny Eccleston stated in Mojo that the album "should have been rotten" given its fraught creation, "but DM's momentum kept rolling.