Joy Division: Closer LP

Postpunk pioneers Joy Division left an indelible mark on Manchester’s burgeoning music scene in the late 1970s. Where punks, armed with anger and adrenaline, reconfigured rock by employing its most primal qualities, the postpunks dealt in dissonance, inverted sonic balances, and introspective lyrics. Producing a legacy perhaps larger than their own output, Joy Division lasted little more than three years and recorded only two studio albums, but the poignancy and sheer originality of their music have ensured their essential status in rock’s pantheon.

 

35 years ago, Joy Division issued their second studio effort, Closer (1980), another seminal post-punk masterpiece which – exactly two months earlier – had already secured its position as their final album, due to frontman Ian Curtis’s suicide. Closer is an album which is effectively impossible to listen to without considering the circumstances under which it was ultimately released, i.e. posthumously, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a classic in its own right. 

 

Musically and lyrically driven by the prevailing despair of Curtis, Closer was once again produced by Martin Hannett, who also helmed the group's debut Unknown Pleasures, and he and the band weave sprawling emotional chaos and shifting atmospheres and textures together here into an enormously powerful ten-song tour de force. Standouts include "Heart And Soul," "Isolation," "Eternal," "Decades," and the wrenching "Twenty Four Hours."