Power, Corruption & Lies

The opening bass figure of “Age of Consent” feels like a door being kicked open. New Order’s debut, Movement, had inevitably carried the shadow of Joy Division and Ian Curtis; Power, Corruption & Lies sounds like a band discovering that grief did not have to determine the shape of everything that followed. Released in 1983, their second album keeps the tension and angularity of post-punk but lets synthesisers, sequencers and machine rhythm move much closer to the centre. The future arrives not as a clean break, but as excitement intruding on seriousness.

The band produced the record themselves at Britannia Row Studios in Islington. Compared with Movement, the electronic vocabulary is far more assertive, and the sessions also produced “Blue Monday”, released separately as a 12-inch single rather than as part of the original album. That distinction is useful when hearing Power, Corruption & Lies on its own terms. It does not depend on the group’s most famous dancefloor statement. Instead, it explores the unstable space between guitar band and electronic group from several angles.

“Age of Consent” is all momentum, Peter Hook’s melodic bass pulling against bright guitar and insistent drums. “Your Silent Face” moves in the opposite direction, using long synthesiser lines and patient repetition to create a colder, more suspended atmosphere. “5 8 6” pushes the sequenced side of the band harder, while “Leave Me Alone” closes with guitars chiming in overlapping patterns. The variety is striking because the record never sounds like a survey of styles. Bernard Sumner’s understated vocal presence and the band’s preference for repetition give the album a consistent emotional reserve.

Peter Saville’s cover, based on Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting A Basket of Roses and overlaid with a colour code, mirrors the music’s productive collision of old and new. Inside, New Order are doing something similar with their own history. Human playing rubs against machines; melancholy sits beside movement; beauty can arrive through severe design. Power, Corruption & Lies is rewarding because the transformation is still audible. The band have not perfected a formula. They are discovering, track by track, that uncertainty itself can be an identity.