A basket of roses on the cover, a color code instead of the band’s name, and inside, the sound of a band finally finding itself. Power, Corruption & Lies is where New Order stopped being “the band that used to be Joy Division”.
Out of the shadow
Their first album, Movement (1981), still sounded like Joy Division in mourning. For the second, released on Factory Records on 2 May 1983, they recorded at Britannia Row Studios and leaned hard on synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers. “Blue Monday” came out just weeks earlier and wasn’t on the original UK LP, but the two share the same DNA. Peter Saville’s cover used a 19th-century still life by Henri Fantin-Latour, with a color-coded alphabet in place of a title. In 2010 the Royal Mail put it on a stamp as one of ten classic British album covers.
The songs that matter
- “Age of Consent”: Peter Hook’s melodic bass and a chorus that soars. One of the great opening tracks.
- “Your Silent Face”: a slow, beautiful synth piece that nods to Kraftwerk, with a famously blunt last line.
- “5 8 6”: the drum-machine experiment that sits close to “Blue Monday”.
- “Leave Me Alone”: the guitar-driven closer, with Joy Division’s melancholy still close by.
Why it still holds up
Cold electronics, Hook’s melodic bass and Bernard Sumner’s understated vocals, moving between moody and dance-floor ready. It’s the perfect bridge between post-punk and electronic dance music, it still turns up on greatest-albums lists, and it set the template for the rest of New Order’s career.
Hear it on New Wave Radio
Read the full story on our New Order page, then request “Age of Consent”.
Links: New Wave Album Reviews · Joy Division
