Day 325: New Order – Power, Corruption & Lies

I’m in the mood for a classic today. Granted, today’s album isn’t a new one for me, but I definitely haven’t listened to it for at least a decade and I don’t know why, so it’s time to listen to New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies.

Album cover courtesy of Factory Records

New Order was formed under famously tragic circumstances in Manchester in 1980. The members of the band had originally been part of Joy Division from 1977 to 1980 when they disbanded, as their singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. They’d made a deal earlier that if any of them die, they’ll not use the name Joy Division anymore, so bassist Peter Hook, guitarist Bernard Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris disbanded and started again as New Order. They were later joined by Gillian Gilbert as a guitarist and keyboardist.

Their debut, Movement, was released in 1981, and it consisted of darker post-punk tracks, more in the style of Joy Division. After that, they started listening to a lot of dance music and italo disco, and their following record found them experimenting with a new sound, no longer connected to their old band.

Power, Corruption & Lies was released in 1983 as their second studio album, and it completely redefined what they were doing: it’s electronic post-punk that’s inspired by artists like Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk. It’s danceable and mostly quite upbeat, but there’s still an edge to it. It’s massively influential but there’s still nothing quite like it, it’s also still oddly a bit futuristic. It was the first of their records that was produced by the band, who’d decided that they wanted full creative control over all of it.

What is there even left to say about this one. “Age of Consent” has to be one of the best songs of all time, it makes me feel like I want to frolic. To move from the grief and the sadness from losing Ian Curtis and the potential of what Joy Division could have been, to making an album that feels so free and so unattached to anything they’d ever done before is just such a massive feat, it’s almost a moving. But even without all that, it’s still an almost perfect album. 9.5/10.

Also, I love this YouTube comment from the video below because I was also thinking it:

“Dear FBI,
When I searched "age of consent," I was looking for this song.
Thank you for understanding.”