Joy Division – Closer (1980)

Closer, the second and the last album of Joy Division, is one of the darkest albums the world has ever seen. It was released posthumously only a couple of months after the death of the band's frontman Ian Curtis. The album can be seen as something of a suicide note of the lead-singer. The lyrics are morbidly depressing and the sounds and melodies are not that much cheerier either. The final touch is the album cover that features a tomb in black and white. Ian Curtis was dangerously depressed while making this album because of his personal life and he felt real anxiety following their huge success based on the first album. The band was just about to go on their first North American tour when Curtis hung himself. This album features some of Joy Division's greatest songs and in some ways it's a lot darker than the debut album Unknown Pleasures.



It took me longer to start appreciating this album than it took me to fall in love with Unknown Pleasures. Where Unknown Pleasures seems to be an exploration in sounds and new kind of music, Closer is much more personal and hypnotic. The funny thing about Joy Division is that almost none of the best-known songs are on this album, even though it's many times been called the best work of the post-punk era. I find that this is often the case with popular bands. Their most successful songs are rarely the best ones. I have difficulties in understanding how a band that sounded like this managed to become so successful to begin with, but I guess times were different back then and people appreciated innovative new sounds and personality more than now.

The album starts with rolling tom drums in the song Atrocity Exhibition. The bass lines and drums are fairly similar to many songs on Unknown Pleasures, but the electronic sounding guitar buzzes and noises highlight immediately a step away from debut album's echoey sound world. Second up, is probably the most well known hit from this album, Isolation, which, despite of its dark topic sounds more upbeat than the rest of the album. This is one of those songs that you can dance to and celebrate the irony. Passover is a simplistic song mainly just carried forwards with drum beat and vocals. The bass and guitar only offer some buzzes and pulsing in the background. The song sounds genuinely menacing. Colony on the other hand places quite heavy and loud sounds to otherwise similar song. This song is a demonstration of Joy Division's style of keeping the drums and bass pretty much in the same loop throughout the song. A Means to an End has dark and twisted disco beats in the drums and bass, which to me sounds most like the post-punk revival bands 25 years later. Heart and Soul is also something of a hit. The eerie and creeping guitar and organ sounds along with Curtis' whispering, yet melodic vocals make this song sound truly magical. Twenty Four Hours is a more typical post-punk song that resembles some songs by The Cure or Echo & The Bunnymen. I'm sure many other bands were really inspired by this songs industrial heavy beats. The Eternal is one of my favourite songs by Joy Division. It's slow, beautiful and filled with echoes and industrial beats. In my opinion, this should've been the last song on the album and thus it would've provided a perfect death mass for Curtis. There is, however, one last song after this, Decades, which has some lo-fi organ sounds that must have been an inspiration for band's future as New Order, which also is kind of appropriate as the last song.

There are many elements that make this album so dark and menacing. The looping bass lines and drums, the electronic sounding beating guitar riffs and Curtis' lyrics and monotonic vocals etc. But one thing that I think makes this album sound so truly scary is the fact that at least in the first half, there are hardly any echoes in the instruments. It all sounds like it's recorded in a dusty warehouse room filled with boxes. But then, on top of that, they've added Curtis' vocals which do have quite a lot of echo, which makes his voice sound really otherworldly.

I don't think there are any music videos from Closer, so I'm going to link to the hit song Love Will Tear Us Apart, which wasn't on the album, but became the biggest hit the band ever had. It shows the minimalistic performance style the band had on stage and the industrial surroundings of late-70's Manchester where the band grew up. Many people have said that Manchester of that time is a significant member of the band, because otherwise these kinds of sounds would be unimaginable.

People who don't really like sad music, often call most of the sad music I listen to depressing. I don't think most of that music is depressing. It's just sad and beautiful. Joy Division, however, is quite genuinely depressing music, but at the same time, I can't help but love those sounds that made this band different from any other band before or after them.

Listen to the album on Spotify.