After nearly 40 years, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark still aren’t content to sit on their synth-pop laurels. Paul Humphreys knows the risk of nostalgia, and he’s not interested in taking it. “We’ve always wanted to step out of our comfort zone… try to go places that scare us a little bit,” he says, discussing The Punishment of Luxury, the band’s latest effort to keep the OMD machine in motion.
And motion is the key word. If technology has made anything easier in the modern era, it’s also made it overwhelming. “We call it the tyranny of choice,” Humphreys says. “There are so many synthesizers and so many sounds—whatever you can imagine, there’s a machine that can make it.” The result? Endless tweaking, second-guessing, and a kind of analysis paralysis that can suck the life out of creativity. To combat it, OMD took a painter’s approach: they limited their palette before they even started. “We wanted to make sure we were still writing songs, not just getting lost in possibilities.”
But even as they push forward, they’re not about to erase their past. “We embrace our back catalog,” Humphreys says. “We’re not one of those bands that’s embarrassed by our old hits.” In fact, they recently performed Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality in full at London’s Royal Albert Hall, a project that led them to rediscover just how simple their early songs really were. “Some of those tracks only had five instruments total,” he admits, a realization that led to a renewed focus on restraint for The Punishment of Luxury.
That album’s title comes from a 19th-century painting, but OMD weren’t interested in the piece’s misogynistic overtones (which depict women floating in purgatory for wanting something beyond domesticity). Instead, they lifted the phrase for its modern implications. “Marketing people are just feeding us a frenzy of advertising for things we don’t actually need,” Humphreys says. “It’s like, ‘You won’t be happy until you have a 4K TV,’ but no one stops to ask if they were unhappy with the old one.”
If the album’s concept is a critique of our consumer-driven world, its music is a reminder that OMD are still finding new sonic spaces to explore. Take “La Mitrailleuse,” a track inspired by a World War I painting. It’s a terrifying piece—gunfire, mechanized destruction, and an unsettling rhythmic pulse. “We animated the painting and wrote a song for it,” Humphreys explains. “The First World War was the first mechanized war, so we wanted to reflect that with sound.” But rather than sheer chaos, the band found a way to shape it into something hypnotic. “We used the gunfire as a rhythmic element, almost like a drumline,” he says. “It keeps you locked in, even as it unsettles you.”
It’s that duality—melodic beauty wrapped around something sinister—that has always defined OMD. And it’s why, even four decades in, they’re still moving forward. “We don’t have to do OMD anymore,” Humphreys admits. “We’re doing it because we love it. And as long as we have something to say, we’ll keep saying it.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the title track!
