Closer

Joy Division recorded Closer in London in March 1980, two months later Ian Curtis killed himself, and so a record made by a band still moving forward arrived that July sounding like an epitaph, with a tomb on the sleeve.

There's no hearing it now without that, and the record doesn't fight it. But how it was made matters too. The songs came out of jams in the band's practice room and from two periods: the guitar-driven ones they had been playing live through 1979, like “Colony” and “Twenty Four Hours,” and newer ones from early 1980 that lean on synthesizer, “Isolation,” “Heart and Soul,” “The Eternal” and “Decades.” Martin Hannett produced it again and pushed everything into a cold, enclosed space, which the guitarist and bassist disliked and which is a large part of why it sounds the way it does. “Atrocity Exhibition,” named after a J. G. Ballard book, opens it with a guitar treated until it barely sounds like one. Curtis sings low and level, closer to someone reporting than someone pleading. The album ends with “The Eternal” and “Decades,” slow and spare, and by the last of them the synths and his voice make something near a hymn. The newer songs point toward what the others would do as New Order; the older ones are the band at its most driving. Caught between a band beginning and a band ending, it's the best thing they made.