New Order

Movement
Factory, 1981

New Order spent the first few years after Ian Curtis's death trying to find their own feet. Between the end of Joy Division and 'Blue Monday', the ridiculously-popular club hit they would be remembered for, the band released a string of singles that captured them in transition: 'Ceremony', a minimalist recording of a track they had played live with Curtis; the twitchy 'Everything's Gone Green' which foreshadowed their move to dance music; and perhaps the best, 'Temptation', an upbeat pop song with cooed backing vocals. With each single, Bernard Sumner's vocals got a little bit more confident, a little bit more him.

Movement, however, seemed almost like a throw-back. Released between the three singles, the album sounded like a synthesis of Joy Division and something else – a style not quite solid enough yet to be tangible. It's the most subdued record in either Joy Division or New Order's discography, with both Sumner and Peter Hook trying to recreate Ian Curtis's gloomy vocals without daring to emulate his passion or paranoia.

It was released a year and a half after Curtis's death in November 1981, overshadowed by the compilation of Joy Division's unfinished work and rarities Still put out just a few weeks earlier. There are few discernable choruses or regular song structures and the vocals are so muted that it sometimes sounds like an instrumental new wave record. But what it lacks in emphasis – or perhaps even originality, considering Curtis's posthumous influence – it makes up for in consistency. Unlike New Order's later patchy albums, everything on Movement seems to fit together. Its best moment is 'The Him', an ethereal track with a cascading drumbeat that eventually breaks into a howling mess.

Two decades after the fact, it feels apt that Movement was so utterly different to the band's singles of the time – and certainly to all those that followed. It's warmer and more human than anything Joy Division released and more detached than anything New Order went on to achieve. If Sumner and co. were the last great singles band, this is their most cohesive album – the introverted flipside of their commercial pop career.