Almost with the onslaught of sudden synaesthesia, the mention of Joy Division conjures up a black image with rigid, white radio pulses surging uniformly amongst its center. Not only does the mountainous image adorn t-shirts and posters but also represents a defining moment in rock music.
With its claustrophobic production and Ian Curtis’ foreboding lyrics, Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s 1979 debut album, set the bar for post-punk excellence with its depressive bounce and poetic clarity. The harmonious marriage of Curtis’ vocals and Bernard Sumner’s guitar elevated each song, from “Insight” to “Wilderness,” to a unified statement, a technique later incorporated and perfected by Morrissey and Johnny Marr.
Unknown Pleasures continues to influence modern musicians such as Vince Staples, who tailored the cover of his 2015 debut album Summertime ’06 to match the style. The simplistic cover has come to symbolize solipsistic alienation and human suffering beneath a pleasant-enough surface.
But for Joy Division's second and final album, 1980’s Closer, everything before hidden from view bubbled to the surface, creating a bleak and harrowing listening experience without any of the veiled hope present on the debut. With its largely white album cover complete with a photograph of an Italian tomb, Closer captures the final lucid remarks of a man near the endgame of human suffering, refusing to numb the world’s hostile indifference.
Supporting by the comparatively cheerful single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the band’s highest charting song, Joy Division released its grim final album in early July of 1980, around the peak of post-punk’s popularity.
The band would disband and return as New Order following the album’s release since two months prior in May of 1980, frontman Ian Curtis succumbed to his depression and hanged himself after listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, found resting on his turntable. He was 23, but his late-life lyricism suggests that he had not been bound by any sense of time.
With mournful, unhinging verses and the haunting phrases Curtis turns into hooks on each of Closer’s nine songs, he delivers glimpses not only of his own suffering but the suffering he found in humankind as a whole in a sort of resigned nihilism. His vocals feel as if they were only sung to validate his feelings, one of the only things in which he could believe.
The album’s fourth song “Colony” is crafted after Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel "Heart of Darkness," which suggests Curtis wanted to encapsulate the cruelty that the nature of man might inflict, a theme present throughout the album coupled with allusions to a brutal war. Yet, the opening lines of “Colony” read “A cry for help/A hint of anesthesia” alluding to a more personal struggle, balancing a duality of internal and the external forces.
“Atrocity Exhibit,” the album’s opener with a grindingly dissonant guitar tone, centers around a narrator leading a group of tourists throughout an insane asylum, a metaphor that could double for modern life in general or the epileptic seizures that Curtis sometimes suffered during the band’s performances. He dares listeners to embrace the sight with the repeated phrase, “This is the way/Step inside.”
Joy Division focuses on physical and mental instability on most of its short catalog, but Closer includes an additional illness, that of a failing relationship between Curtis and his wife, Deborah. “A Means To An End” and “Heart and Soul” specifically deal with the lingering pain of not simply a breakup, but almost an abandonment felt by the narrator. In the latter, Curtis’ chorus twice laments, “Heart and soul/one will burn.”
Aside from the verbal pain of Closer, Martin Hannett, who mixed the record, renders Sumner’s guitar as a sort of dissonant scythe carried by an angel of death looming behind each word. Less pronounced than on Unknown Pleasures, the drum and bass guitar form an industrial current undulating in the background like the unstoppable progression of life, beating forward with blatant cruelty and suffering. And never did a synthesizer sound so sorrowful than on the songs “Isolation” and “Decades.”
“Decades,” the final song in the 44-minute record, depicts the aftermath of a sort of war with statements of desperation like “We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chamber/Pushed to the limit/We dragged ourselves in.” It provides a fitting conclusion to a frame of mind spiraling downward through a mortal brimstone. Curtis’ earnest and pronounced delivery of all these songs give the impression that he does not want us to miss anything he has left to say.
Each song on Closer offers a clearer picture into Curtis’ psyche and perspective leading up to May 18. But the final three songs appear to come from a place not occupied by the living, giving them an ethereal and ghostly knowledge. Nothing summarizes the singer’s deeply troubled state better than a passing line on the third to last song “Twenty Four Hours.”
Free of distractions and false hope, Curtis embraces his future, “Destiny unfolded/I watched it slip away.”
Luke Furman is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Do you listen to Joy Division? Let Luke know by tweeting him @LukeFurmanLog or emailing him at lf491413@ohio.edu.
