- 00s mix · 2024
- 90s Music Greatest Hits · 2024
- Substance (2023 Expanded Reissue) · 2023
- Substance (2023 Expanded Reissue) · 2023
- Substance (2023 Expanded Reissue) · 2023
- Substance (2023 Expanded Reissue) · 2023
- Be a Rebel Remixed · 2021
- Be a Rebel Remixed · 2021
- Be a Rebel Remixed · 2021
- Education, Entertainment, Recreation (Live) · 2021
- Education, Entertainment, Recreation (Live) · 2021
- Education, Entertainment, Recreation (Live) · 2021
- Education, Entertainment, Recreation (Live) · 2021
Essential Albums
- 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.
- 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.
Artist Playlists
- Channelling post-punk gloom and synth-pop gleam into new forms.
- A spotless synth-pop legacy leads to a maze of side projects.
- Manchester post-punk meets Manhattan dancefloors and German electronics.
Live Albums
Compilations
More To Hear
- Why Elton digs the Icelandic band Kaleo.
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.
- ORIGIN
- Salford, England
- FORMED
- 1980
- GENRE
- Alternative