Dave Gahan has been doing some great work in recent years, including trips out from Depeche Mode to appear in Soulsavers and, now, Humanist. The latter is a project by Rob Marshal connected to a movie about singer songwriter Gavin Clarke.

 

What Marshal has done is contact his dream lineup of collaborators, and this includes Mark Lanegan, who also worked with Soulsavers and got Dave into this one. We have the single ‘Shock Collar’ today featuring Gahan, and he explained his input to NME: “The music was already all together and Mark had already written the words, so really it was just me singing the melody. It was a weird collaboration. Mark would have normally been singing this, so I had it in my mind to be true to what they were doing.”

 

It’s definitely on trend with Gahan’s musical history: “Rob’s stuff is pretty dark,” he continued to NME. “The record is pretty unusual and way more instant. There’s a lot of depth added by Mark as a guitarist too. It’s great to work with people like this because they stretch you. Having been lucky enough to make music with other people for the last 40 years, I’m always looking for someone to take me out of my comfort zone. It makes me better at what I do in the long run. I learn so much from people with fresh ideas. Well, I nick so much – to be honest.”

 

The eponymous Humanist LP will be out in February.