Darkness Illuminates: Goth Punk's Great Escapism

While goth punk's theatricality dramatizes concerns about depression and suicide amongst young people today, its safe spaces are inviting to the otherwise alienated and ostracized.

                                      
Music
    
        Industrial Punk: Here's a Finger, Now Form a Band!
    
Iain Ellis

    19 Jun 2019

Books
    
        There's Room in Joy Division's Expansive Universe for Jon Savage's 'This Searing Light...'
    
John Garratt

    19 Apr 2019

Featured: Top of Home Page
    
        Joy Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else'
    
David Chiu

    02 Apr 2019

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While goth punk's theatricality dramatizes concerns about depression and suicide amongst young people today, its safe spaces are inviting to the otherwise alienated and ostracized.

This week we are celebrating the best post-punk albums of all-time and today we conclude with part five featuring Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads and more.

Moving Units has always crafted eminently danceable, melodically infectious dance-punk. With Damage With Care, nothing changes.

New Order return to the U.S. for a short tour in support of their latest album Music Complete and visit the Late Show for a performance while in New York.

Guitarist Bernard Sumner shares his recollections of Joy Division and New Order, both seminal post-punk outfits whose influence cannot be overstated.

Bernard Sumner artfully describes where the music of Joy Division came from; distilled to a single cold, bleak, industrial Manchester night.

Songs of anxiety, paranoia, freak-outs, chilling verses, feverish desire, harrowing lyrics -- they all make for damn good music.

We all search for escape, and while music, drugs, radicalism, or fame may ease the monotony, the protagonists of so many of these tales find themselves at the end of their narratives still constrained.

"On the one hand, he was ill and vulnerable; on the other, he was a screaming rock god." By taking Ian Curtis down to his own level, Peter Hook provides his mate with a fitting tribute, neither sordid nor facile, neither pat nor pandering.

Not every band borne out of a great predecessor can measure up. Here are five that do.

Canadian trio offers up mixed bag that's heavy on the cold, light on the bold.

Down under supergroup mixes Joy Division, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, and Devo for a good time.

Can Joy Division’s 1979 debut make you feel the pleasures of a normal man? It's the 64th most acclaimed album of all time. We’ll share a drink and step outside for another Counterbalance.

It's that time of the year, again. Music fans are making their lists of what they hope to find wrapped in pretty paper at Christmas, and music publications are making their lists of what should be on those lists. Now, I have something to say about lists.

New Order's debut album, Movement, celebrates its 30th birthday this month. To celebrate, we're counting down the classic group's 15 best tracks.

Today, the intersection of dance music and rock music seems only natural. However, the process has been in the making for decades, and this list provides an introduction to ten of the best albums this genre combination has to offer.

Eric Klinger and Jason Mendelsohn take on Joy Division's Closer in this week’s edition of Counterbalance. It’s Number 41 on the Acclaimed Music list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. This is the way—step inside!

The subterranean recesses of New York City's Le Poisson Rouge were an appropriate location for Susanna’s Tuesday night performance, a mix of original tunes as well as well-known covers.

If the singer in your band suddenly died, would you call it quits? New Order did the opposite, proving in an endless stream of brilliant music that Joy Division was merely a warm-up on the path to pop greatness.

It’s not surprising that Joy Division’s cigarette-smoking crowd of followers in their dark, heavy overcoats would in a few short years become the first wave of gothic rock fans.

If any band is heir to the musical path Joy Division laid out, it would be the Cure, quite possibly the second-most influential band of the post-punk era.

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The first in a multi-part series commemorating 30 years since the demise of cult legends Joy Division.

When asked about how he feels about the term "icon", Bernard Sumner tells PopMatters that "I don't think I'm a legend. I think I've just got an interesting history." This, his time with Joy Division, New Order, and new band Bad Lieutenant are all a part of this epic interview ...

Words and Pictures by Rory O'Connor

Band buys Casio in attempt to shake unshakeable comparison. Fails. Film at 11.

El Ten Eleven + Controlled Storms: 18 November 2009 - The Khyber, Philadelphia

The Drums debut EP will leave you hoping for an Indian summer.

Factory Records was as influential in design, sound production, and defining what a label could be as it was in music.

Part 2 of our video venture through lost musical geniuses discovers an unhappier tradition in The UK, where comebacks are not de rigeur! Exemplars include Joe Meek, Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, and Ian Curtis.