Power, Corruption & Lies

Power, Corruption & Lies is the album where New Order stopped being the band that used to be Joy Division and became the band that helped redefine what an electronic rock group could be. Recorded while the four members were still learning their new synthesizers and sequencers, it fuses churning post-punk guitar and Peter Hook's soaring, melodic bass with drum machines and bright synth textures — a dance-rock hybrid that critics hailed at the time as a declaration of independence from the band's past, and have since enshrined as one of the defining records of the 1980s. The opening "Age of Consent" is routinely singled out as an all-time peak, "Your Silent Face" is a quietly sublime piece of electronic balladry, and the whole record sustains a mood that is somehow simultaneously danceable and melancholic.

Its rough edges are part of the charm. The band were figuring out the technology as they went, which gives the record a fragile, wintry quality its slicker successors never quite recaptured. Bernard Sumner's vocals are understated and his lyrics famously cryptic — the album title itself was borrowed from a George Orwell novel, and even the cover withholds the name, hiding it in a color code — and listeners who need literal, front-and-center songwriting will find themselves shut out. Critics who quibble tend to point at the middle stretch, where a couple of tracks half-measure next to the highlights, and at the seven-minute instrumental sprawl of "5 8 6," which either hypnotizes or tests patience depending on taste.

Underneath the dancefloor sheen, reviewers broadly agree, is genuine emotional weight: the record reads as a band working through grief by building something new, and its blend of euphoria and sadness is why it still resonates decades on. Where opinion genuinely splits is less about whether it's a landmark — that verdict is essentially unanimous — than about which of its eight songs are the peaks, and how it compares to the more overtly commercial (and equally acclaimed) albums that followed it. The consistent throughline across nearly every assessment is that this is where New Order found itself.