Joy Division

Unknown Pleasures (1979)

Martin Hannett separated the band's instruments into isolated sonic chambers, adding reverb, echoed drums, and tape manipulation until the record sounded like it was being transmitted from underground rather than recorded in Manchester. Ian Curtis's bass-register vocals over Peter Hook's high melodic basslines — heard most clearly on 'She's Lost Control' — is a configuration that remains unusual in rock. A statement of claustrophobic urban alienation that no subsequent act has entirely superseded.

Sleeve notes

Unknown Pleasures · 1979

Joy Division formed in Manchester in 1976 out of the wreckage of the Sex Pistols' Free Trade Hall show — the one where, legend has it, so few people attended that half the future bands of British post-punk were among them. What they built out of the debris was something more tormented and more precise than most of their contemporaries: a music of isolation, industrial dread, and Ian Curtis's seizure-prone, prophetic baritone. Their debut Unknown Pleasures (1979), produced by Martin Hannett in an almost adversarial relationship with the band, sounds like it was recorded in a building mid-collapse — bass drum decay stretched out, guitars ghostly and distant, every surface stripped of warmth.

The tragedy of Curtis's suicide in May 1980, hours before the band's first American tour was due to begin, is both the inescapable fact of Joy Division's legacy and the thing that most risks obscuring their actual achievement. Closer (1980), recorded in the weeks before his death, is an extraordinary record — more austere than Unknown Pleasures, more patient, more final. Without Joy Division, post-punk has no emotional template, shoegaze has no sense of interiority, and New Order has a different future.