New Order

Essential Albums

  • Technique
    Technique
    Technique

    To celebrate the completion of New Order’s Technique—the group’s fifth full-length album—the band members threw a soirée at Peter Gabriel’s Real Word Studios, an event drummer Stephen Morris later described as “an absolute frenzy—the best party I’ve ever been to.” The celebration included DJs and ravers who’d been bussed in from The Hacienda, the Manchester nightclub now seen as ground-zero for the UK’s late-1980s acid house explosion. New Order had helped keep the club afloat during the venue’s financially early lean years, when it was a concert venue; their payoff came when the potent combination of electronic music and ecstasy hit England like a tsunami. Having sat at the vanguard of club music since their early years, the members of New Order could now ride this new wave—creatively and financially. The club explosion wasn’t limited to the UK. Work on Technique had begun in Ibiza, the Spanish isle long known for its all-night dance parties, where the members of New Order spent more time on hedonistic pleasures than productive studio activities. The musicians revelled ’til dawn to the Balearic sound—a mix of Euro-disco and Latin music that was one of the major precursors of acid house—as well as American club music emerging from not only the Detroit techno scene, but also the house music movements of Chicago and New York City. All of those influences would inform Technique, released in 1989. The band’s previous album, Brotherhood, had suffered from a strict segregation between rock tracks and dance tracks. On Technique, the members of New Order found a more affable way for their two sounds to share space on an album. Songs like “All the Way” and “Guilty Partner” retain a guitar, bass, drums and voice formation that is sonically akin to The Cure (“All the Way” could even be mistaken for “Just Like Heaven”). But the lead single, “Fine Time”, is an instrumental that favours sequenced beat and synth segments that blend together like a DJ in the mix. New Order’s hard-line rock-loving fans may not have been able to find their footing with Technique, but to audiences—and critics—the album is an absolute frenzy.

  • Substance
    Substance
    Substance

    By 1987, the members of New Order were at the height of their powers. They’d released four albums of revered electronic-flavoured rock that found them carrying the post-punk torch of their first band, Joy Division, while adopting dance and New Wave into their sound. And they’d let loose a series of club-centric singles inspired by New York’s thriving early-1980s post-disco, proto-house, early electro and Latin freestyle scenes—all of which helped push New Order further into the electronic dance music milieu. New Order dominated both college-rock radio and dance-music playlists. Unfortunately for fans, New Order’s music wasn’t always easy to track down. Club singles from the early 1980s—including the mammoth hit “Blue Monday”—were available only as 12-inch singles. The 1985 dance-floor classic “The Perfect Kiss” could be found on the album Low-Life, but only in truncated form. And 1986’s beloved “Bizarre Love Triangle” was released in a variety of versions. It was tough to collect all of the group’s smashes in one place. A solution arrived in the form of 1987’s Substance, a two-disc compilation that contained a treasure trove of music. Yet the band members weren’t content with simply slapping a bunch of old recordings together. Substance opens with a new version of “Ceremony”, a track written by the four members of Joy Division while singer Ian Curtis was still alive, and recorded in March 1981 by the three surviving musicians as the first New Order single; the Substance version is a re-recording featuring member Gillian Gilbert adding guitars. Other early hits, like “Temptation” and “Confusion”, appear here in new, Substance-specific versions. Those updates give the album a sonic consistency. It also explains why many fans consider Substance to be their favourite New Order “album”—and why it became the only one to achieve platinum status.

  • Low-Life (Definitive)
    Low-Life (Definitive)
    Low-Life (Definitive)

    As the members of New Order approached their third full-length album, the group was nearing another crossroads—though one not nearly as consequential as its members had faced following Joy Division’s tragic demise. Having slowly shed the sullen elements of post-punk in favour of more affirmative dance rock, New Order had landed several beloved club-oriented singles, including the Arthur Baker-assisted “Confusion”, and found critical acclaim with 1983’s Power, Corruption and Lies, which yielded the unexpected smash “Blue Monday”. New Order’s next step, obviously, was to aim for the stars. Despite being courted by folks like David Geffen—who was eager to capitalise on the band’s potential—the band members chose to work with relative newcomer Tom Atencio, and signed with Quincy Jones’ Qwest Records. Considering the label’s roster included R&B star Patti Labelle, soap-opera sex symbol Jack Wagner and an arguably past-his-prime Frank Sinatra, it wasn’t the most obvious home for the post-punkers-turned-synth-savants. Yet Low-Life, released in 1985, was proof that New Order was never going to take the easy route. While the bandmates agreed to promote the album with a big lead-off single—an industry-standard practice they’d so far shunned—they did so with a caveat, releasing an 8-minute-long thumper, “The Perfect Kiss”, that didn’t exactly lend itself to radio play. And while Low-Life’s “Sub-culture” took its rhythms from Latin freestyle music, its lyrics focused on London fetish clubs. Still, despite some dark turns—and the album’s title—the overall mood of Low-Life is noticeably lighter than anything Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris had worked before. The lads had always been able to write catchy singles, but their album cuts were often po-faced dirges. With Low-Life, they were crafting vibrant tunes like the delicate, Ennio Morricone-inspired instrumental “Elegia”—a song that wound up in the hit teen film Pretty in Pink, bringing the band’s popularity to new highs.

  • Power Corruption and Lies (Definitive)
    Power Corruption and Lies (Definitive)
    Power Corruption and Lies (Definitive)

    At the time of its release in 1983, the oft-repeated refrain that greeted New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies was that the band had moved beyond the dour 1970s post-punk of its debut album, Movement. That album had been recorded in a grief-stricken hangover after the death by suicide of Ian Curtis, who’d fronted Joy Division—the group whose surviving members would form New Order. Power, Corruption and Lies, then, was treated by observers as a more optimistic effort, full of the bright synth-pop that would define the band going forward. But press play on the opening track, “Age of Consent”, and you’ll hear one of Peter Hook’s signature chorus-laden melodic basslines, followed by a snappy hi-hat pattern that drummer Stephen Morris would admit he recycled from Joy Division’s biggest hit, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. The song takes the best parts of Joy Division’s and gives them a polish; the only hint that it’s from the 1980s comes courtesy of Gillian Gilbert’s acutely artificial synth strings. Still, if Power, Corruption and Lies finds the members of New Order grappling with their past, at least they’re taking confident steps into the future. This included parting ways with longtime producer Martin Hannett, whose drug use had become untenable. Without the iconoclastic studio wizard, Morris and Gilbert delved into the new electronics at the time—music machines with comically bold names, like Oberheim DMX, E-mu Emulator, LinnDrum and Korg Digital Delay. Those devices opened up a new avenue for writing and recording via extended electronic jamming sessions. It also meant running the risk of losing days’ worth of work when the unreliable machines conked out. This instability prevented reluctant singer Bernard Sumner from delving into the electronics the way he would in later years. But his evolving guitar tone—which on Power, Corruption and Lies included more shining chords and delicately played notes—would be prevalent on songs like “The Village” and “Your Silent Face”, both of which also find Sumner unapologetically embracing his tenor rather than tentatively simulating Curtis’ iconic baritone.

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About New Order

After the 1980 death of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, surviving members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris asked keyboardist Gillian Gilbert to help them pick up where their former band had left off. But when they added synths to their post-punk songs, they ended up creating one of the most influential electro-dance bands of all time. The Manchester group debuted in March 1981 with "Ceremony", a tune originally written for Joy Division, but the subsequent Movement, with its darkly melodic tracks, revealed a band in transition. On 1982’s “Temptation”, New Order came into itself, pairing its post-punk ethos with the textural disco beats members heard in New York clubs. As technology caught up to their creativity, “Blue Monday” became a mandatory playlist addition for hands-in-the-air dance parties (and remains the case several decades later). Power, Corruption & Lies, released in 1983, with its gorgeous Peter Saville-created floral artwork cemented the group’s status as dance-rock auteurs. They dominated the dance floor through the ‘80s with slinky singles like "The Perfect Kiss” and the glittering “Bizarre Love Triangle”, collected on their 1987 retrospective, Substance. That compilation—which introduced the explosive non-album single “True Faith”—helped them finally tap the U.S. market. By the time 1989 rolled around, New Order took the ecstasy-fuelled house scene by storm with their club-ready LP Technique and followed the fun with England’s best FIFA World Cup song “World in Motion” and 1993’s Republic, featuring indie-disco classic “Regret”. While the lineup has changed over the years—Gilbert left and rejoined and Hook departed in 2007—New Order plays on, releasing albums, pushing boundaries and showing the kids how kaleidoscopic dance rock is done.

FROM
Salford, England
FORMED
1980
GENRE
Alternative

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