JOY DIVISION - UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

Released on June 15th, 1979, the debut LP by Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, is celebrating 45 years on the shelf today. It's an album that would define both the band and a genre of music, bringing to the fore the potential of studio production in a way that was as significant as The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, elevating what could have been a mundane post-punk band to the level of visionary pioneers.

Joy Division's beginnings and career have been well documented in recent years, with both theatrical dramatizations and documentaries detailing everything from their inception following that infamous 1976 Manchester Sex Pistols gig to the tragic 1980 suicide of their lead singer, Ian Curtis. The creation of their first LP was a case of an unsuspecting young band falling into the clutches of an ambitious producer who was looking to redefine his role in the studio. Over the course of three weekends in April of 1979, Martin Hannett would impose his signature sound on the group, a move that would leave some members of the band feeling like they'd been misrepresented by the end product.

Once Joy Division got into the studio to record, Martin set about taking their raw, aggressive sound and deconstructing it, pulling the pieces apart and setting them out in a sonic landscape that emphasized distance and negative space. Akin to the approaches that defined dub music, Hannett utilized reverb, echo and abstract electronic ambience to push those pieces into a more expansive configuration where each element suddenly stood out in stark relief, accented and counterpointed in ways that were much more subtle than the "pedal to the metal" thrust the band would use on stage. The effect was to soften their sound, while also creating a menacing and brooding sense of depth and space, with its accompanying sense of isolation. It's an approach that engendered feelings of paranoia and apprehension. Of course, that tactic was greatly enabled by superlative songs and the somewhat unorthodox style of the band, which pushed the bass frequencies in to the upper register, an approach Peter Hook had developed simply out of a necessity to be able to hear himself on stage against the extreme volumes they favoured in their performances.

Once the album was mixed, some members of the band came away from the production feeling disheartened and frustrated by the way they were reshaped in the studio. Hook, in particular, had envisioned a harder, tighter and more concentrated sound from the band, and its only in recent years that he's been able to concede that there was method in Hannett's madness, and that the end results stand the test of time. Some critics were also ambivalent towards Hannett's indulgences, dismissing them as frivolous ornamentation and distractions from the band's essence. But the tides of legacy have seen the album codified as a comprehensive masterwork of innovation and originality. Nothing had sounded anything like it beforehand, with every instrument finding a distinctive new texture and tenor of expression.

The graphic design for the album has also gone on to have a life of its own as a distinctive item of iconography. It's become so ubiquitously associated with the band that one has to wonder how many of the millennial and gen-Z folks running around with the design on their T-shirts have ever actually listened to the record. Taken as a whole, they add up to an artifact that defines a generation and survives as a timeless example of musical risk taking at its best.