Armin van Buuren finally turns ‘Enjoy the Silence’ into techno

Armin van Buuren has rebuilt Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’ as a melodic techno record, credited to van Buuren and Silver Panda as ‘Here In My Arms (Enjoy The Silence).’ It arrived 10 July on his own Armada Music. The 1990 original still outsells everything else in Depeche Mode’s catalogue, and its Spotify count crossed a billion plays this year.

The rework keeps the song’s vocal hook and its melancholy intact, setting both against driving percussion and layered synth work aimed squarely at club systems. It sets van Buuren’s festival-scale sound alongside Silver Panda’s newer, rising work in melodic techno. Reworking older records has become a recurring move for van Buuren: he remixed Faithless’s ‘We Come 1’ in 2015, revisited Human Resource’s ‘Dominator’ the year after, and took on Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ in 2019.

‘Here In My Arms (Enjoy The Silence)’ circulated in van Buuren and Silver Panda’s sets well before the official release, turning up at EDC, Ultra Miami, Stade de France and Ushuaïa Ibiza. The release lands during a dense stretch for van Buuren, who also put out ‘No Mercy’ with Adam Beyer this year and played an early-morning back-to-back with Enrico Sangiuliano at Kappa FuturFestival in Turin, before issuing a vinyl-only classic trance set recorded live at UNVRS Ibiza.