OMD – Dazzle Ships (vinyl album)

“Dazzle Ships,” released in 1983, marks one of OMD’s most daring departures. After the success of “Architecture & Morality,” co-founders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys resisted pressure to repeat themselves. Instead, they pushed into unfamiliar territory, folding shortwave radio recordings, early sampling techniques, and stark electronic textures into a concept album about technology, surveillance, and the Cold War.

The album’s title and visual identity draw on Edward Wadsworth’s Vorticist painting of dazzle-camouflaged ships, reinterpreted for the release by longtime OMD collaborator Peter Saville, whose design frames the record’s themes of coded communication and fractured modernity.

Shaped by writer’s block, label expectations, and a desire for reinvention, McCluskey and Humphreys created a work that blends experimental sound collages with some of their most striking melodic pieces, including “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph.” Initially dismissed as too strange and too political, “Dazzle Ships” has since been reclaimed as a visionary cult classic, influencing artists across electronic and alternative music.

Today, what once felt out of step sounds prescient: a bold, uneasy transmission from the early 1980s that remains one of OMD’s most adventurous statements.