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Yet in the end, the trio of Gahan, Gore, and Fletcher put their name to one of Depeche Mode’s best albums, an all-in all-great listen that would be the obvious peak of a lesser band’s catalog.

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An official album documentary released as part of the group’s late 2000s reissue series details the impact of Wilder’s departure and Gahan’s crises in particular, and how what typically might have been a three-month effort took close to a year’s worth of on-and-off work. In this light, Ultra shouldn’t have existed. The band’s dysfunction seemed worse than ever. Gahan first attempted suicide that same year and almost fatally overdosed in 1996 during a break in the recording sessions. The overlay of increasing internal dysfunction led Alan Wilder, the group’s key musical experimenter and arranger, to finally leave the band in 1995. Pennebaker’s 1989 Depeche concert film 101, Fletcher memorably and self-deprecatingly called himself the member who just “bum around,” but in truth he had become Depeche’s in-house manager, now trying desperately to hold everything together. During the recording of 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion and its subsequent tours, he plunged into a brutal heroin addiction, while guitarist and songwriter Martin Gore wrestled with alcoholism, all of which factored into the worsening depression and eventual nervous breakdown of keyboardist Andrew Fletcher. It was in marked contrast to his clean-cut appearance until that point, and it became the visual signal of deeper troubles. Soon after the massive triumph of their 1990 opus Violator and the epochal hits “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence,” lead singer Dave Gahan moved from the UK to Los Angeles and became a louche rock star, or a visually coded version of one-long hair, beard, tattoos.