For Fans of Depeche Mode

"Personal Jesus" gets the most play and deserves it, but walking into Depeche Mode via a greatest-hits compilation is like reading only the chapter titles of a novel. Violator is 45 minutes of flawless pacing, from the menace of "World in My Eyes" to the bruised resignation of "Clean." Every song earns its place. It is the right starting point because it is complete: it has the body, the darkness, the hooks, and the emotional resolution. Start here.

Exciter from 2001 gets skipped because it followed the commercial peak, and because it is genuinely quiet where the classic records are intense. That quietness is the point. It is a record about emotional exhaustion after devotion, spacious and unsettling. The production by Mark Bell is the most considered of any Depeche Mode album, and Gahan sounds like a man who survived something. Fans who give it time consistently name it among their favorites eventually.

Anton Corbijn directed Depeche Mode's videos for years before he made Control, his film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division. That lineage matters. Corbijn understands the visual grammar of this world: the post-industrial north, the beauty in austerity, the spiritual intensity of young men making electronic and post-punk music as if their lives depended on it. If you know the music it depicts, the film plays like a eulogy for a whole way of feeling. If you do not, it will send you straight to the records.

D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus filmed the 1988 Rose Bowl show; the Maysles Brothers followed a group of fans driving cross-country to reach it. The intercut result is what makes 101 essential beyond its catalog value. You are watching people for whom this music is a lifeline, not an entertainment product. The concert footage is superb, but the road-trip material is what you remember. It is a film about what it means to need music rather than simply enjoy it.