Secondhand Daylight

Secondhand Daylight feels like a city after the crowds have gone home. Magazine’s second album is colder and more severe than the record that introduced them, with keyboards, guitar and bass often used to create distance rather than warmth. Released in 1979, it pushes the possibilities of post-punk towards something more architectural and unsettled, where songs can feel carefully designed without becoming emotionally neat.

Recording took place at Good Earth Studios in London in January 1979 with Colin Thurston producing. One significant change from the debut concerned songwriting. Howard Devoto, still the band’s lyricist, did not write the music for most of the album; John McGeoch, Dave Formula and Barry Adamson took larger compositional roles. That redistribution helps explain the record’s breadth. McGeoch’s guitar can be wiry or atmospheric, Formula’s keyboards often create the deepest sense of unease, and Adamson’s bass gives the arrangements a muscular centre even when the surfaces feel brittle.

“Rhythm of Cruelty”, released as a single, is one of the album’s more immediate points of entry, but even there Magazine resist straightforward release. Elsewhere, the music stretches into darker, more patient shapes. “The Thin Air” is the album’s instrumental, reportedly left without Devoto lyrics because the band ran out of studio time, and its absence of a vocal only emphasises how much character the musicians could generate through arrangement. Devoto’s singing across the rest of the record remains wonderfully difficult to pin down: detached one moment, suddenly theatrical the next.

What makes Secondhand Daylight compelling is its refusal to smooth out those tensions. Magazine had emerged from punk’s aftermath, yet they were already interested in structures, textures and instrumental ambition that punk orthodoxy might have distrusted. The record asks for a little patience because it does not constantly announce its hooks. Once its internal logic becomes clear, however, the apparent austerity starts to feel rich with detail. Listen to the bass and keyboards as much as the vocal. Much of the album’s drama is happening in the shadows around Devoto.