Post-punk, the genre mostly affiliated with Joy Division, came to grow as a more experimental take on straightforward punk music, where Brittish bands had a heavy focus on rhytmic and melodic bass lines while keeping the instrumentation punk-ish. Bands like Joy Division and The Cure came to be the ones to break out into the mainstream in England, while more experimental bands like This Heat and The Pop Group became staples among the more alternative crowd. Other bands like Throbbing Gristle took the idea of punk and ran it into industrial ground instead, creating yet another off shoot for punk as a genre and this is merely touching upon what was going on in The United Kingdom during the years between 75 and 80 for post-punk as a genre.
During the band's shortlived era, Ian Curtis was suffering from depression which would ultimately lead to him deciding to take his own life in 1980, the year after Unknown Pleasures was released. As sad as it may be, Curtis' state of mind became one of the biggest factors in Joy Division's and Unknown Pleasures' success and originality, due to the dark, gloomy atmosphere at hand aswell as Curtis' sad, destructive and depressive lyrics which are quite apparent during most of the album. Joy Division didn't have a sliver of happiness in their music, both the name of the band aswell as the cover art for the debut EP, An Ideal For Living were references to nazi-Germany and WWII, which led to a bit of controversy around the band (as it should have since they were still punk at the core).
They became a monumental band, despite their shortlived reign and their legacy still lives on today, be it through Tumblr-posts of good looking people in Unknown Pleasures t-shirts or through the major influence they had on many punk acts to come in the early years of the 80's. Their spot on this chart is not an unwarranted one.
I first came across Joy Division and Unknown Pleasures through a cover of the song Shadowplay on an album with a collection of b-sides by the band The Killers. At the time I had no clue of Joy Division but I did come to enjoy the song despite it being many years until I would finally come across the original. I didn't actually listen to Unknown Pleasures until about a year ago when I redsicovered it.
At the time I didn't care for their music that much, I felt that many of the songs on the album, especially the bigger part of the A-Side, felt quite lacking from the loss of energy and tempo that usually were apparent amongst the punk I was familiar with. I was mainly drawn to songs like Disorder, which had more hectic drumming aswell as more dominant lead guitars, giving way to a stronger sense of melody in the bands music.
What really turned me around on the bands music however, was watching Anton Corbijn's feature film Control about the life and death of the vocalist Ian Curtis, retelling his tragic story, going from an ordinary guy with an interest for punk music to one of the biggest underground stars of his time, only to fall as another martyr in music history, becoming another "what if?" along the lines of Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Jim Morrison and several more. The film, how correct or incorrect it may be, gave a different perspective of the band and especially Curtis as this tragic figure who saw the world in another light, something I've come to appreciate a lot more in different artists that I usually didn't care for, something that we see quite often in this genre to be honest.
It gave a different light to their music. Hearing New Dawn Fades as Curtis' belches out "A loaded gun won't set you free!" only to faintly whisper the continuing line of "so it seems...". I do believe that it ultimately was me not quite "understanding" the band's music, and not that I couldn't appreciate the musically, but more that I didn't quite understand what Curtis' thought and felt when he wrote Disorder.
While I still don't find Unknown Pleasures to be one of the greatest albums on this list, I do feel that it deserves its place on this list, and clocking in at spot number 20 is fair enough for an undisputed post-punk legend. Unknown Pleasures might not be my personal favorite post-punk record, barely even a favorite in Joy Division's short discography, but it is an influential album with merit to itself.
Unknown Pleasures is a straight forward punk record and a great entry point for the vast amounts of post-punk in the world. If this is a genre you're curious about then this is where you should start. If this is an album you enjoy then you're in luck because there's a ton of phenomenal albums aswell as a ton of variation that came to be out of post-punk. Genres like new-wave, no-wave, industrial and several others grew out of this movement which itself grew out of the first renditions of punk.
I think it's hard for generations that didn't experience punk at its high point to really understand how monumental the movement was, not only musically but also historically, dominating a huge amount of the 70's and shaping what we know as both the middle and the working class of society. What an experience to be 19 years old in 1979 right?
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
7/10
Anton Öberg Sysojev
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