General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Some Great Reward

Some Great Reward is the fourth studio album by the English electronic band Depeche Mode, released on 24 September 1984 by Mute Records.¹ Produced by the band with Mute founder Daniel Miller and engineer Gareth Jones, it continued the sample-based industrial direction of its predecessor Construction Time Again and produced the band's American breakthrough single, "People Are People".²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Artist and position	Fourth studio album by Depeche Mode, following Construction Time Again (1983)¹
Release	24 September 1984, Mute Records, catalog number STUMM 19; US release on Sire Records followed on 29 October 1984¹^•⁴
Length and tracks	9 songs, 40 minutes, from "Something To Do" to "Blasphemous Rumours"⁵
Production	Depeche Mode, Daniel Miller, and Gareth Jones; recorded January to August 1984 at Music Works, London and Hansa Mischraum, Berlin²
Chart peak	Number 5 on the UK Official Albums Chart; number 51 in the United States⁶^•⁷
Key songs	"People Are People", "Master and Servant", "Somebody", "Blasphemous Rumours"⁸
Reissue	Remastered and reissued in 2006 as a Collector's Edition SACD + DVD and 180-gram LP⁷

Recording and production

The album was recorded between January and August 1984 at Music Works in London and the Hansa Mischraum in Berlin, and mixed at Hansa.² Production was credited to Depeche Mode, Daniel Miller, and Gareth Jones, the team behind the previous year's Construction Time Again.²^•⁹

Studio technique. Jones had pioneered a reamping approach with the band across Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward, and Black Celebration: synthesizer and sampler outputs were played back through speakers and re-captured with microphones rather than fed directly into the mixing desk. At Hansa Tonstudio in then East Berlin, the same studio where David Bowie recorded "Heroes", Jones and Miller placed a hired PA system in the middle of the three-story-high Studio 2 and pressed other rooms into service as echo chambers, inflating the synthesizer sounds to what one account calls stadium-sized dimensions; guitar amps dialed into distortion added grit that a direct signal could not produce.¹⁰

The band also expanded its electronic toolkit on the album. Reviewers note the added impact of the Synclavier alongside the continued use of sampling, and Fairlight CMI sound sampling by Gareth Jones.¹¹^•¹²

Songs and themes

All nine tracks were written by Martin Gore except "If You Want", the sole composition by band member Alan Wilder.¹³ The full running order is "Something To Do", "Lie To Me", "People Are People", "It Doesn't Matter", "Stories Of Old", "Somebody", "Master And Servant", "If You Want", and "Blasphemous Rumours".⁷

Where Construction Time Again had been political in its commentary, Some Great Reward turned social, with Gore addressing love, lust, and marriage in the mid-1980s.¹⁴ The subject matter ranged widely: "Master and Servant" conflates sexual and economic politics, "Blasphemous Rumours" carries one of Gore's most cynical lyrics in telling of a suicidal teenager who finds God only to die soon afterward, and "Somebody" is a Gore-sung piano ballad mixing wit and emotion.⁸ "Lie To Me" pairs a bitter story of infidelity with the line that gives the album its title, "So lie to me, like they do it in the factory, make me think that at the end of the day, some great reward will be coming my way".¹⁵

Two firsts fall on this record. "It Doesn't Matter" marked Martin Gore's first vocal performance for Depeche Mode, establishing him as the band's voice for soft ballads, and "Somebody" uses a subtle sample of crowd noise that grows into the primary sound as the track fades out.¹⁵ AllMusic's Ned Raggett highlights Alan Wilder's arrangements, from the crowd samples beneath "Somebody" to the call-and-response a cappella opening of "Master and Servant", and notes that with this album Dave Gahan's singing style settled into the manner he would keep for the next decade.⁸

Release and chart performance

The album entered the UK Official Albums Chart on 6 October 1984 and peaked at number 5, spending 11 weeks on the chart through 15 December 1984, with one further week in January 1985.⁶ In the United States it reached number 51.⁷ The UK release appeared on Mute as STUMM 19 on vinyl and cassette on 24 September 1984; the US version followed on Sire Records on 29 October 1984.⁴

"People Are People" became the band's real American breakthrough, its most commercially successful song from the album despite being, in one reviewer's judgment, outclassed by much of the surrounding material.³^•¹⁵ Martin Gore later recalled that commercial returns in America stayed flat across this period, saying in a 2017 interview that "all of our albums from Some Great Reward to Music For The Masses seemed to do the same" before Violator broke the pattern.¹⁶

Reception and legacy

Contemporary response was strong. Record Mirror wrote in September 1984 that "Depeche Mode come of age, Martin Gore comes clean and the result is an addictive album as you'll hear all year".¹⁷ AllMusic's retrospective review calls it "the peak of the band's industrial-gone-mainstream fusion" and "still one of the best electronic music albums yet recorded", while describing it as a companion piece to Construction Time Again.⁸^•¹¹ A 2024 fortieth-anniversary essay in The Quietus frames it as the culmination of one phase of the band's career before the run of albums that made them one of the biggest bands on the planet.⁹

Retrospective rankings place it mid-career rather than at the top: NME's ranking of every Depeche Mode album puts it at number 11, and Louder's notes that while it represented a new creative high on release in 1984, the band went on to outstrip it.¹⁸^•¹⁹ SPIN's 2023 ranking singles out "Something To Do" as a clunky, lightweight opener that holds the album back, while calling "People Are People" and "Blasphemous Rumours" among the band's most beloved songs.²⁰ The album was remastered for the 2006 Collector's Edition series, released on SACD + DVD in Europe and CD + DVD in North America alongside a 180-gram LP.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Music › Musical works and recordings › Albums and recorded releases › Studio albums › New wave and post-punk albums

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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